From Craig Barnett:

“Most Quak­er com­mu­ni­ties now have no children’s meet­ing, and this has come to seem nor­mal. Many peo­ple who have joined in the last cou­ple of decades have nev­er seen a child in a Meet­ing House, and take it for grant­ed that a Quak­er Meet­ing is only for retired people.”

I don’t know the sit­u­a­tion in the UK where Bar­nett lives but around me in the U.S. the cyn­i­cal answer would be that they’re at soc­cer prac­tice. All of the church­es I know have seen sharply declin­ing Sun­day School class­es in recent decades.

Because nei­ther my wife’s church­es or my Quak­er meet­ings have pro­vid­ed good Sun­day Schools, our fam­i­ly has long jug­gled ser­vices to be able to go else­where to pro­vide our kids with a Sun­day School class and friends. For the past num­ber of years it’s been with a very friend­ly Mora­vian church over in the next town. We’ve been so involved that we think of them as our oth­er church fam­i­ly and many of the mem­bers have become friends. We’ve known them through years, from births to mar­riage break-ups to kids grad­u­at­ing and going off to col­lege. Just ear­li­er this week I took three of our kids to their bowl­ing out­ing. It’s real­ly com­mu­ni­ty and some­thing I don’t see hap­pen­ing in any near­by Friends meeting.

But even at this church, with a strong, long­stand­ing pro­gram going back over 100 years, it’s not hard to notice class­es get­ting just a bit small­er every year and Sun­day School teach­ers get­ting a lit­tle more thinned out. Even the chil­dren of core mem­bers will miss Sun­day morn­ing class­es for weeks at a time because of Sun­day morn­ing sports.

My wife’s new Ortho­dox church has a Sun­day School, which is nice, and a def­i­nite plus. Being even it does­n’t seem to be that large giv­en the size of the congregation.

I’d like to build up a chil­dren’s pro­gram at the small Friends com­mu­ni­ty that we’re rebuild­ing but I must admit to being unsure about what’s real­is­ti­cal­ly even pos­si­ble. This is a phe­nom­e­non far greater than any sin­gle con­gre­ga­tion or denom­i­na­tion. Shout-out to the Chil­dren’s Reli­gious Edu­ca­tion Col­lab­o­ra­tive, who is try­ing to address these issues.

Nur­tur­ing the seed 

Young peo­ple need multi-generational community

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