As the family is the child’s first society, so the local church should be the child’s second, larger, wider society.  The home constitutes the first social organization for life, the one in which growing lives prepare for the wider social living.  Then should come the next forms of social organization, the school and the church, each grouping lives together and preparing them, by actual living, for wider circles of life.

Sec. 1.  RELATIONS OF CHURCH AND HOME

Many of the perplexing problems which arise in the family, as an institution, in respect to its relations to the church, and as to the developing relations of children to the church, would be largely solved if we could get an understanding of the fundamental relations of these two institutions.  The institutional difficulties occur because these relations appear to be competitive.  Here is the family with its interests in bread-winning, comforts, recreations, and pleasures, and on the opposite side, making apparently competing claims for money, time, interest, and service, stands the church.  That is the picture unconsciously forming in many minds.  There is more or less feeling that money given to the church is taken from the family and impoverishes it to that degree, that time given to the church is grudgingly spared from the pleasures of the home, that it is always a moot question which of the two institutions shall win in the conflict of interests.

But the family must take for granted the church as its next of kin.  The home must not by its attitude and conversation assume that the problems of the relationship of children to the church arise largely from the opposite concept, as though these were rival institutions.  We carelessly think of the children as those who, now belonging to us, are to be persuaded to give their allegiance to another institution, the interests of which are in a different sphere.  We think of the church as an independent thing and therefore feel quite free to discuss its merits or shortcomings and to criticize it if it fails to meet our standards, just as we would criticize the baker for soggy or short-weight bread; to our minds, the church is something set off in society, separate from the homes, as much so as the schools or the library or a fraternal lodge.

This thought of the church as a separate something, having an existence independent of ourselves and our families, leads us farther astray and makes yet more difficult the development of right relations between the church and the children.  If the church is a thing apart we can analyze its imperfections as we might stand and ridicule a regiment of raw recruits.  It marches by while we stand on the curb.  But here, surely, is one of the simplest and most easily forgotten truisms:  the church is no more than our own selves associated for certain purposes.  If the church fails in an adequate ministry for children, shall we condemn it as we would a bridge that failed