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, but it doesn’t seem to be that large. I’m glad the kids have it though.
I’d like to build up a children’s program at the small Friends meeting that we’re rebuilding but I must admit to being unsure about what’s realistically even possible. This is a problem far greater
quakerrenewal.substack.com
Thank you for this. I’m a longtime member of Redwood Forest Friends Meeting in Santa Rosa, CA, and the clerk of the Children’s Program Committee of Pacific Yearly Meeting. We, unfortunately, are experiencing the same thing, and I’ve got some ideas about it that won’t fit here. What do we do? One thing is realize that we need to commit to our social, not just political, lives. But it was also interesting to hear about your involvement with the Moravians. My grandparents were Moravian missionaries to Nicaragua from the 20’s to the 40’s. Since my father was raised by his maiden aunts in Bethlehem, PA, and basically abandoned by his parents, he had a lot of anger toward the Moravian church (although he sure did learn how to play piano!), and he became a lefty atheist. Figuring out how to present our lives in faith to young people is an ongoing concern of mine. And being a teacher of young people in a group that has such a wide basis of belief, is a challenge that I don’t always know how to navigate. I do know some adults who are now having children, and they always give me a hug and tell me that our Meeting was important to them as they were growing, so I must have been doing something right.