Children and Youth | Church of the Ascension, Midland

Why do you want to make your First Holy Communion?

I don’t want to feel alone; I want to join the community.

I want to do the projector. Making my communion is training to be older and to have maturity and more responsibility.

I want to be an altar server one day because it’s fun and you get to do everything.

What has Holy Communion got to do with being an altar server?

If you do the altar serving before you can take communion, you don’t know what to do – you haven’t practised.

This is what Jessie, Nihal and Archie told me on Friday after their final preparation session for their first communion, and I’m sharing it with their permission. Their responses were immediate, and it was clear to me that there is no doubt in their minds what they are doing today, and why they are doing it.

For our reflection as a community, I want to consider what their words can teach us about what we are all doing here today, and every day, as Christians, as participants in the Anglican church, as members of Ascension community. This reflection is shaped by three key perspectives formed through my experiences in the church. The first is through involvement that has been life-long, from baptism through all the sacraments and schooling in the Catholic tradition, followed by twenty-eight years in the Perth Anglican diocese. The second is through being the spouse of a priest, and raising three children together such that supporting their authentic and meaningful engagement in parish life was quite simply necessary for family cohesion. The third perspective is possibly the most unique, gleaned from rich experiences in youth ministry: joining a Christian youth movement at 13, becoming a national leader at fifteen, into fulltime employment in youth ministry at 21, and a decade later turning that experience toward voluntary work, coordinating initiatives for engaging children and youth in four Anglican parishes over twenty years.

Though these experiences have been varied and situation-specific, they collectively inspire some fundamental ideas about faith, religious communities, and the participation in the church of children and youth. These ideas determine what I hear when I listen to our communicants, and what I learn from them about our work in Midland.

I am moved and encouraged by the insights of our younger parishioners. They affirm for me that a genuinely authentic approach to engaging children and youth in parish life is a religious one, taking guidance from the original meanings of the word – in Latin: respect for what is sacred, conscientiousness, divine service, and holiness; through the Anglo-French: being bound, or connected. To think of youth ministry in this way can be counter-cultural in the Australian context.

I say this because my observations through involvement in the Anglican church is that very often children and youth are viewed as additions to the main community, subjects on the sidelines; sometimes bonus but always assumed to be temporary, passing through, perhaps to be managed - kept out of the way during the service, kept busy or entertained, indulged and applauded, and sometimes even discouraged from attending at all if the particular community isn’t keen to have sacred adult time marred.

To me, these responses belie a deep anxiety in the church that it doesn’t know what to do with children, especially where the situation doesn’t look or feel like it did in one’s own past. And this not-knowing can be masked by claims that justify not owning and dealing with that anxiety. These claims sound like: church isn’t a place for small children; children would be happier in Sunday School; no teenagers want to come to church; and, I don’t believe in imposing my beliefs on my kids. I’ll let them make up their own minds when they’re adults.

I’m not sure that any cultural tradition, anywhere, has endured under that last mindset.

I reflect that the thinking behind these and similar statements are defeatist, based on unfounded shame-based assumptions that church has nothing to offer the young, and that their spiritual needs can somehow be put on hold until they’re ready to work it out for themselves.

A religious approach to the life of a worshipping community, based on concepts of connection, obligation, and service, reshapes these beliefs. Through this lens, there is no mystery to the place of children and youth in parish life; there are no resources beyond what the community has, there are no problems to be managed. There is only a group of people who choose to be together in the space. When the community tends to that space well, the parish family will comprise a range of ages, and be a marvellously diverse collection of all manner of people with whom we might not necessarily cross paths in our everyday lives. Brought together as a parish community, our reasons for being here and the needs we seek to meet will be fundamentally the same.

We will all want:

to be seen and accepted
to be respected for who we are
to be allowed to be, who we are
to find peace
to be moved by the spirit in this place and amongst these people
to learn more about Jesus
to learn more about the Christian faith
to learn more about the Anglican tradition
to make a contribution that is valued
to enjoy the involvement
to feel that it is worth something
to belong.

To think of church involvement through a religious approach also makes all the petty differences about how church is done, fall away. It reminds us that where there is a table, bread and wine, and where two or more are gathered, there is Christ, and there is the church.

I have learned that when individuals prioritise their own personal tastes over their love for each other, they risk the health of the church, and where love and humility take precedent, community flourishes. In Midland, I have come to appreciate a deeply religious approach to being church. It is apparent to me that the Ascension community has endured over many years and through many changes because its awareness of its responsibilities in time and place is not fixated on a particular idea of what church should look and feel like. Something I value deeply about my parish, is that Midland truly understands stewardship.

How do I see this in our ministry with our youngest members? Religion is a form of stewardship. Like stewardship of the earth, to tend to the religious tradition is to know its history, to care about its preservation, to respect the natural processes of evolution, and to be wise to the fact that the church will continue beyond one’s own life, and that we can pray for that time beyond our own but should not strain to control it, nor despair for it. Good stewardship embraces faith in the future because it will be in the hands of the community members we have trained for the task. Training the young to fully participate in culture is what successful communities have done for millennia. Training is loving and empowering and trusting; it helps to safeguard our natural and social worlds. Training is not manipulating to ensure exact replication as we have done it. It is sharing and passing on. It is preparing others to carry the flame – faith in community – forward. And to trust the flame-bearers.

Many models of ministry to families, children and youth speak in terms of First Third, a simple way of referring to the first 30 years or so of life. Thinking through this model, we can see that training begins at baptism when parents bring their children into the heart of our community, and we sing with joy over the child and feast together in celebration.

Training continues when we understand that childhood is a fertile time, and that children are watching and listening; learning their value and importance to the community and its traditions through the ways they are encouraged to participate.

Moving into young adulthood, explicit training is replaced by wise support for the initiatives of the young; secure in knowing that they are preparing to embrace greater responsibilities and leadership.

If we have done this well, we can let go of our anxieties and fears. Our flame-bearers have our confidence and blessings to stay or leave and we know their choices will be right.

Thus, at every stage children, youth and their families are central to the community, not passers-by to be tolerated or feigned over, but fundamentally important.

Do you recognise these principles at work in our community? Do you see that children, youth and young adults comprise almost twenty-five percent of the number of regularly attending parishioners?

Are you aware of what they bring?

service, as altar servers, projector operators, offertory helpers, musicians, peer leaders, morning tea providers

devotion through candle lighting, quiet prayer, and meditation
joy and energy and movement and laughter
smiles
questions and comments
respectful treatment of others
outreach to support the spiritual and social lives of other young people.

Children, teenagers, young adults, and parents, we recognise your service, and we are enriched by your enduring presence. And congratulations Nihal, Archie and Jessie for completing the preparation for your Holy Communion today.

To follow the priest in the family from community to community is an exercise in humility. And the gift I have gained from this wandering is to understand deep in the soles of my feet what communion is - that where there is a table, bread and wine, and where two or more are gathered, there is Christ, and there is love, and all will be well. And it is at the communion table each week where I am most humbled by the blessings of our diverse community.

Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. When we are gathered around the altar and some of our smallest children stand at the side of the priest, I am reminded of this saying of Jesus’s. And I have spoken with the children about this – that the special work they do at the altar is to draw our eye to the chalice and the host. This would not occur if it was me or many of you standing in their place. The proximity of their attentive faces to the table is not cute, it is profound. As I aim to prepare myself for communion by shrugging off my riches – my distractions, vanity, obsessive thoughts, and irritations – I find that it helps greatly to be drawn to the host through their respectful gaze. I am guided through the eye of the needle by their awe.

On Friday, I asked Archie, Nihal and Jessie another question:

Why do you like coming to church?

Coming to church helps me learn more about Jesus.

I like coming because of the music. It relaxes me. Because it’s hard to get up and get here especially when it’s dark and cold. It’s a struggle. But when I hear the music, I feel relaxed.

I like to feel holy.

What does it mean to feel holy?

Feeling holy is feeling lightened and blessed by God. It’s happy and joy, and church is the place where this happens.

What is Communion about?

The bread. When you hold up the eucharist, it’s the moon.

“When you hold up the Eucharist, it’s the moon.”