If Children are not Crying the Church is Dying

“If Children are not crying, the Church is dying”- is a quote that I heard from a venerable priest who said this to his congregation, which had many complaints about kids being loud in the Church. This quote can have many other variations as well: “If children are not playing, the Church is dying,” or “If children are not screaming, the Church is dying.” All these sayings mean one thing: Without our kids, we do not have our future, we do not have anything to hope for, and the joy is sucked away from the parish. That being said, why must the kids be in the Church (meaning within the liturgy and not in the basement) at all? For many decades, Orthodox parishes around America have applied a protestant method to dealing with kids in parishes. The method is quite simple: send the kids to the basement of the Church where they can play and allow grownups to worship without any distraction. This method is coupled with, again, the Protestant understanding that kids are not mentally fit to grasp the service and, therefore, they should not be a menace to those who can. Unfortunately, throughout history, protestant Churches have strayed so far away from the original Church that we, as Orthodox Christians, must refrain from copying any methodology from them that is, at best, questionable. This particularly applies to the way we deal with our children. It is also curious that Protestants, who claim for themselves are scripturally based, do not heed the words of the Savior who said: “Let children come to me,” and instead send them out far away from worship service into their private playrooms.

It has to be noted that this is not the Orthodox way of dealing with kids! Protestant Churches, by definition, are not sacramental, nor do they have a connection to the true theology of the Orthodox Church or to the life-saving and grace-filled liturgy, which is more than just a show that you have to be focused on but rather something to be immersed in. Orthodoxy is not intellectualism but the living faith of the Living God, which makes space for the littlest ones among us to be present and, in their way, worship the Lord. If our children are not immersed in the divine liturgy while tiny, they will feel no connection to the sacramental life of the Orthodox Church when they are older. Furthermore, suppose we reduce the worship life of our children to bringing them up for “Our Father” and the reception of the Holy Communion (which they will have no idea how it is made nor what it is since they spent the whole service away from the sacrament). In that case, we risk losing them when they are older. To testify to this, there are numerous Serbs, Greeks, Romanians, and other (former) Orthodox who have experienced the protestant method of dealing with kids and are, currently, outside of the Orthodox Church and some of them outside of any Church. In a conversation that I had with a lady who removed herself from the Orthodox Church and is now a member of a Protestant congregation, she said: “Orthodoxy and Protestantism are entirely the same. It all comes down to “Our Father” and drinking wine….”- says the woman, who when she was a child was removed from her heavenly Father and sent into the playroom and was invited upstairs only to say “Our Father” and “drink wine.”

We do not want this for our kids. People among us who are bothered by the beautiful noise of our children should go all the way up to the first pews and leave the space open for the parents who sacrifice themselves every Sunday to bring their kids to Church and teach them Orthodoxy. Ultimately, we all have to ask ourselves this question: If the Lord was physically among us and he heard the noise that children make in the Church, what would he say or do? Would he instantly request that the Children be removed from Him? Or would he say what he said 2000 years ago, teaching us how to deal with our children in our Churches:

“Let Children come to me.”