Children at Worship

Caroline S. Fairless

Description

The author shows in this book how a parish can incorporate its children into full participation with the worshiping community. Tapping their creativity to design a spectacular array of materials for worship -- a storyteller's cloak, prayer cards, confessions stones, rap sermons, sculpture, and painting -- liturgy comes intensely alive for parishioners of all ages. As Fairless demonstrates, the full participation of children in corporate worship, while not a simple matter, is deeply rewarding.

An introduction by Louis Weil, professor at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, provides the theological rationale for the inclusion of all baptized members in the worship life of the community.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Practice
• Christian Rituals
• Philosophie et théologie
• Christian worship
• Liturgy
• Worship

Informations

• Publié par: Church Publishing Incorporated
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780898699104
• Langue: English

Extrait

Caroline S. Fairless
Foreword by Louis Weil
Copyright 2000, Caroline Fairless All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fairless, Caroline, 1947
Children at worship:congregations in bloom / Caroline S. Fairless p. cm. Includes bibliographical references ISBN 9780898693263 (pbk.) Children in public worship-Episcopal Church. Worship (Religious education)
BV26.2F35 2000
00-34613
264 .03-dc21
CIP
Church Publishing Incorporated 445 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10017
Http://www.churchpublishing.org
5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to Maria Gouyd and the children of Holy Family Church without whom there would be no Children at Worship: Congregations in Bloom
Table of Contents
Foreword: Children and the Liturgy-A Perspective
The Rev. Dr. Louis Weil, Hodges Chair and Professor of Liturgy at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, California, sets out the theological framework for the full inclusion of children in church.
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter One: Welcome to Worship
By inviting the children, with their own authentic voices and styles, into new ways of participation in the life of a congregation, we begin to catch a vision of what inclusive community worship might look like.
Chapter Two: Let the Children Come to Me
Our children carry the most compelling, unadorned, intense, immediate, intimate relationship with all that is holy and sacred. We must do more than accommodate them in our worship services.
Chapter Three: Share the Good News
The faith development of children is shaped by storytelling. Powerful storytelling engages the hearts and minds and bodies of the entire congregation. Included in this chapter are specific ways and examples of doing that.
Chapter Four: Dear Mr. God
Children pray what s on their hearts, and prayer is their ministry. Through prayer, children serve as prophets and healers, reconcilers and artists. The prayer life of children is powerful witness to the possibilities of renewal. This chapter introduces prayer cards as a means to embrace the prayer concerns of the entire community.
Chapter Five: Give Me a New Heart, O God
This chapter introduces a theology of confession and its practical application through the use of confession stones.
Chapter Six: The Community of the Bathtized
Chapter Six explores ways to deepen the experience of Baptism for families by including parents, godparents, and children not only in the baptismal instruction but also in the development of the baptismal liturgy.
Chapter Seven: Come to the Table
The celebration belongs to everyone, and the invitation is inclusive. This chapter examines the structures of several eucharistic prayers (prayers of Holy Communion) and offers a vision of a meal in which everyone participates.
Chapter Eight: Paint the Stories
Bring out the artists and the musicians and the poets! The depths to which children can explore their faith is limitless, given a fistful of crayons and markers, glue and a little glitter. Our art serves our liturgical development.
Chapter Nine: A Spillover Church
We must address the questions: What will this new church look like? What stumbling blocks might there be? It is a call to conversion.
Appendix A: The Children s Charter
At its convention in 1997, the Episcopal Church adopted the Children s Charter for the Church. This document calls the people of God in three ways: to the nurture of children; to minister to children; and to discern and raise up the ministries of children.
Appendix B: Suggested Readings
A list of commercial literature which might serve as the foundation for a church library.
Appendix C: Orders of Service
Includes Orders of Service for Holy Communion.
Appendix D: Evolutionary Liturgy
Presents a visual illustration of a liturgy which shifts and develops according to the needs of a congregation.

Arrangement:
This book is arranged in a liturgical order. Think of it as a teaching text for designers of worship, working from the traditional shape of the liturgy.
Under each chapter heading is a brief synopsis of the chapter s content.
Foreword
Children and the Liturgy: A Perspective
The incorporation of children as members of the worshiping community has been a matter of primary pastoral importance in recent years. It is one dimension of the recovery of the continuing role which Baptism plays in the lives of Christians. In this larger context, there has emerged awareness that the practice of the Baptism of infants is an anomaly if it does not bear fruit in the children s participation in the liturgical life of their parish church. We are reclaiming the insight of the early church that Baptism is not a matter of individual salvation so much as the sign of a person s incorporation into the community whose life is grounded in God s saving action in Jesus Christ. Since the weekly Sunday assembly is normatively the occasion of the celebration of the Holy Eucharist as the principal act of Christian worship on the Lord s Day (Book of Common Prayer, 13), it follows that our incorporation through Baptism into the community which celebrates the Eucharist implies that all the baptized members of the parish have a place in that weekly assembly as full participants.
I am emphasizing this fundamental insight because problems have arisen in many parishes as they have attempted to find appropriate ways for the children of the community to participate in a liturgy which has, for centuries, been shaped in accordance with the expectations of an essentially adult gathering of people. In my own observation, the problems which have arisen occur because practical issues have been given first consideration as members try to find ways to incorporate the children. Yet often, with the best of intentions, the parish continues to function with a model of the liturgy in which children have never been present. In other words, the integration of children often runs aground because the often unconscious goal is to maintain the adult model as much as possible. This approach means that the goal is based upon a very limited perspective as to possible solutions other than a modest adaptation of the adult model. In this approach, practical considerations create difficult hurdles, and much attention is given to discussing whether the children should be there for the entire liturgy. If not, then for what part of the liturgy? If they are present for the Liturgy of the Word, then should a brief sermon for children be inserted in addition to the adult sermon? Or should the children be brought in at the Preparation of the Gifts so that they may be present for the Communion rite and receive the eucharistic gifts? Ultimately, of course, all of these questions must be faced, and it is likely that different responses may be developed in different pastoral contexts.
Yet the issue of the integration of children as members of the full worshiping community is an imperative which merits more attention to the grounding in the theology upon which the sacramental actions of Christians are based. For an adequate discernment of this imperative, both the theology and history of the liturgical life of the church work together to suggest that what is needed today is not some minor adaptations of the adult model. In places where children are baptized members of our congregations, as is certainly the case for an overwhelming majority, the appropriate incorporation of children often requires a radical revisioning of the liturgical model itself.
Many of us know from experience that if practical solutions are not grounded in the larger foundation of theology, history, and the pastoral tradition of the church, discussion is often reduced to confrontation. It is quite understandable that, for adults accustomed to liturgies characterized by peace and quiet, a kind of refuge from the stress of daily life, the introduction of children into the assembly, with their active bodies and spontaneous voices, requires a very difficult adjustment. For some people it is an adjustment which they are not prepared to make. And so we make minor adjustments, resulting in the creation of a liturgical model which is not really appropriate to either children or adults. The patch tears the garment. When such a situation exists, experience has shown that often it is pastorally more appropriate to keep the traditional model intact, and to develop a new model at another time on Sunday, a model which emerges from the kind of revisioning which the incorporation of children requires.
Caroline Fairless has enormous experience of such a revisioning of the liturgy from her years of experience as a parish priest in a community where children were highly valued not only for themselves, but for the spirit and gifts which they brought into the liturgical assembly. In Children at Worship: Congregations in Bloom , Caroline Fairless shares the insights she has acquired through this experience. My goal in this foreword is to summarize the theological imperatives implicit in her work, to offer a perspective from history of the gradual alienation of children from the liturgical assembly, and to suggest that the victims of that development were not only the children but also the adult community.
The practice of the Baptism of infants, a practice that is normative in the Anglican tradition, raises a number of theological issues. I am not suggesting here that the practice of infant Baptism should be abandoned by the Anglican Communion, but rather that we have not dealt adequately with the effects of the shift in the practice of the church in the fifth century. At that time the emergence of Christendom meant that infants and children were no longer baptized with their parents because their parents themselves had already been baptized as infants. Yet from a theological perspective, the Baptism of infants rests upon the presumed existence of a committed adult community. The children are baptized into the c