Sec. 4.  CHILD UNITY WITH THE CHURCH

At some time every child of church-attending parents will want to know whether he “belongs to the church.”  One must be very careful here, regardless of the ecclesiastical practice, to show the child that he is essentially one with this body, this religious family.  He may be too young to subscribe his name to its roll, but he belongs at least to the full measure of unity appreciable by his mind.  He must not be permitted to think of himself as an outsider.  Indeed, no matter what our theology may hold, every religious parent believes that his children belong to God.  Do they not also belong to the church in at least the sense that the church is responsible for their spiritual welfare?

The sense of unity must be developed.  Writing the child’s name on the “Cradle Roll” of the church school may help.  Assuming, as he develops, that he is a part of this spiritual family, naturally expecting that he will have an increasing share in its life, will help more.  Parents who dedicate their children to God pass on to them the stimulus of that dedication.  A church service of dedication is likely to impress them with a feeling of unity with the church; seeing other children so dedicated they know that a similar occasion occurred in their own early lives.

The forms of relationship must develop with the nature of the child.  The church needs not only a graded curriculum of instruction but a graded series of relationships by which children, step by step, come into closer conscious social unity, each step determined by their developing needs and capacities.

It is easy to say that the responsibility lies with the church to provide these methods of attachment.  But the church we have been sketching is a congeries of families, after all, and it will do just what these families, particularly the parents in them, stimulate it to do.

Sec. 5.  INCIDENTAL DIFFICULTIES

But what of those instances in which parents are convinced that the church does not furnish a normal and healthy atmosphere for the child’s spiritual life?  There are churches where the Sunday school is simply a training school in insubordination, confusion, and irreverence, or where religion is so taught as to cultivate superstition and to lead eventually either to a painful intellectual reconstruction or to a barren denial of all faith.  There are churches of one type so devoted to the entertainment of adults, to the ministry to the pride of the flesh and the lust of things, that a child is likely to be trained to pious pride and greed, or of another type, in which religion is a matter of verbiage, tradition, and unethical subterfuge.