Sacramental Soil

Rooted in Something Beyond Programs

Photo by James Coleman on Unsplash

This past Sunday I had an experience which reminded me of a conversation I had many years ago. The connection between those two experiences sparked some ideas and maybe this will provide some hope in a sea of despair and anxiety. Hope for a people tossed to and fro by cultural assumptions and programs. Might I say hope for a recognition of all those in the body of Christ; and a hope for the youngest to find a rooted being within that body that withstands the shenanigans of their elders.

I need to set the stage for you. The space we worship in at our local church is multi-purpose. Sunday as part of All Saints we had a potluck meal planned. When we have potlucks we have several round tables set for the morning and the meal. Sunday was also our monthly family Sunday when all children are part of the congregation for the entire worship time. The past three we have added in our preschool aged children and Sunday was interesting for our families. Between the tables and a different service, the preschoolers were being preschoolers. Families with multiple children were wrangling children who wanted to be children in a space they felt comfortable.

But, that space was challenging and some of our families had to move their children out of the space to calm them. I realized this when our time to receive eucharist (communion) came. We offer to bring the sacrament to those who cannot move to the front typically and I had that task Sunday. With the tables we were going to the congregation anyway, but I took the elements to our media booth and then went into the foyer. One mother lightheartedly said “Welcome to the other half of the church.” She was not wrong. As I served the sacrament to that mother her youngest daughter reached up. I squatted to serve the preschooler and the wonder in her eyes as she received the bread and juice reminded me of the grace present in that moment.

Children remind us of the wonder and mystery of faith. They also remind us of the depth and roots we can grow as we embrace faith as risk with direction as my friend Aaron says. Children are not yet jaded by certitude, so their faith is wrapped in risk and potential. Their faith still sees mystery and wonder where we may expect routine. For that child, the act of worship in receiving communion may not be fully understood, but she knows instinctively that it is important because it is something we do always. Even if it was simple imitation of adults, it is imitation which leads to grace.

In that moment I was reminded of a conversation I had with a friend many years ago. She was sharing how she knew her children became rooted in the faith she bestowed upon them. It was a story of the engagement of senses in the Roman Catholic Mass. She told the story of watching the children when they became old enough to recognize experience being “hooked” in a way by the scents of the incense, the sounds of the liturgy, and the mystery of the sacrament. She told me it was in a moment she saw how they were fully drawn into the faith she had entered through marriage.

There is an important lesson here for the Church. A multi layered lesson that houses hope within it. Much prognostication of and identification of problems within the twenty first century Church exists. While I believe identification is easy because it is often experiential, definition and diagnosis are much harder to accomplish. When it comes to children, the Church gets a lot of the diagnosis on the wrong foot. Too much tell children, do with children, thinking of future with children; not enough showing children and inviting children.

I responded to the sharing of one such identification of the problem in an online pastor’s group on losing children and the lack of retention of children and youth past high school with the following.

We have lost them, but we failed the parents of current children first in a myriad of ways. Partly because we treat doctrine as control rather than that which shapes our character. We have shown how little we regard children in our dismissiveness of doctrinal and theological depth in children’s ministry. We betrayed how little we really cared outside of numbers and status quo. We can have all the children in our communities in our programs, but if we don’t care about the deepness of theology and doctrine, we’ll probably lose them as soon as they age out of our age specific programs.

I have a good friend who is a pastor to children and families. I also consider him a fellow Wesleyan-Holiness theologian. He has shared the frustration of how we treat children in the church. One of his sayings is that children don’t get a Holy Spirit Junior, they are the church and experience the same Spirit and are capable of understanding doctrine and theology on their terms. He and I also share a concern about the lack of depth in our language of sacrament in the Church of the Nazarene. Like much of what makes us who we are historically, our sacramental language is often subsumed by generic evangelical shallowness born in the seeker sensitive church growth movement.

It’s no wonder we don’t retain human beings (to borrow a phrase). We don’t give them anything to become rooted within. At the danger of being too specific, the Church of the Nazarene sees communion and baptism as sacraments. As such we believe they are means of grace in which we encounter and receive grace. We get this from John Wesley and the wider sacramental depth of historical protestantism. But as I mentioned in my previous essay, we often mistake the marks of doctrine for doctrine and so the idea of sacrament is often reduced to sound more like the “cool” evangelicals.

Communion becomes something to be taken rather than received. We also tend to receive less frequently so it remains “special” or we don’t “look too Catholic.” Both of those sentiments are born in ignorance of our heritage. We tend to repeat the things we believe are important, so eucharist should be something we receive at the same frequency as monetary offerings and sermons. It is the central aspect of worship for most of the wider Church.

Baptism is even stranger at times. We claim one baptism, but we don’t live out that truth. We treat the baptism of infants as inferior to that of adults. We will re-baptize folk who have already been baptized or say that a child needs to be baptized when they grow up so they understand. Both of those make baptism into a work done by humans rather than a sacrament in which God does the work.

What if we took the sacraments seriously? Just a thought here, but what if we embraced the wonder and mystery of grace imparted through simple bread and wine (or juice for us holiness folk)? Imagine extending the invitation to all those who embrace faith? Especially children who may be more attuned to the work of the Spirit in the sacrament. If part of teaching our hopeful doctrine and our belief in a God who invites, includes an invitation into the grand story of God lived out in sacrament; imagine the roots that can grow in that soil.

Photo by Antonio Alcántara on Unsplash

But children don’t understand…

There’s a reason Jesus said let the children come to him and that we must have the faith of children. As I wrote in my essay “The Faith of a Child;”

Children approach things with wonder, curiosity, imagination, and questions. Do children trust? Yes they do, unless someone harms them. But trust is required when you are seeking to understand the world around you. Trust allows us to ask questions and challenge the ideas we are handed. Trust gives us the ability to ask questions without fear; like children do.

Children have a faith that asks questions and they embrace the wonder of questions both answered and unanswered. We should trust them to understand faith and invite them into the full experience of faith. We just might bring hope to the whole church. The church is all those within the body regardless of age, so we are really only doing what God has already done in welcome. Sure, this may be hard, but the look in the eyes of a child who saw wonder in the simplicity of an invitation to eat the bread and drink the cup gives me an immense amount of hope.

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