Theology of Children

Introduction

Hungry child,
I didn’t make this world for you.
You didn’t buy stock in my railroad.
You didn’t invest in my corporation.
Where are your shares of Standard Oil?
I made the world for the rich
And the will-be-rich
And the have-always-been-rich.
Not for you,
Hungry Child.

Langston Hughes

Though humans have seen much advancement in the past one hundred years there is something vital missing in the list of accomplishments.¹ Marian Wright Edelman, founder and executive director of the Children’s Defense Fund, provides a progress report for the world’s children. She writes,

UNICEF reports “more babies are being born into poverty now than ever before. Never in history have we seen such numbers.” Over 840 million people in the world are malnourished including 160 million children who still die at a rate of 40,000 a day. Our scientific and military progress have not been accompanied by comparable moral progress, as landmines kill and maim thousands of children and toxic waste poison others and degrade the environment for profit.²

 The welfare of children has not been humanity’s top priority in the twentieth century.

As the Community of Christ begins a new century and a new millennium, it must evaluate its moral response to children of the world. As a faith community and a peace and justice movement, the Community of Christ must develop a theology of children based on God’s call to make children a priority.

One Nation’s Failure
“The practice of violence against children is a time-honored tradition in the United States,” writes Barbara Finkelstein.³ As a self-proclaimed world leader, it has provided only a minimal response to its moral responsibility to children. According to Finkelstein, the United States developed a series of interventions that provided merely emergency- based “child saving” actions. She writes,

Child-saving approaches to child-welfare have effectively defined government responsibility as an emergency [emphasis added] condition, a kind of social rescue operation fit primarily for the child victims of adverse family circumstance…they have stigmatized families in need and affixed a series of status-degrading labels to them.⁴  

The welfare of children involves more than just providing a safety net for the most at risk.

The United States has done even less to respond to children on an international scale. The United States government is one of two nations in the United Nations that has yet to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Global Movement for Children outlines ten imperatives based on the Convention.⁵ They are (1) leave no child out,  (2) put children first, (3) care for every child, (4) fight HIV/AIDS, (5) stop harming and exploiting children, (6) listen to children, (7) educate every child, (8) protect children from war, (9) protect the earth for children, and (10) fight poverty. The only other nation to refuse this commitment to children is Somalia.⁶

Toward a Theology of Children
In such a world, God calls the church to make children a moral priority. A theology of children for the Community of Christ must prophetically respond to this lack of concern and/or action on behalf of children by holding the world accountable. Such a theology would be based on four precepts: (1) children are precious to God, (2) all children are God’s children, (3) children have a privileged place in God’s community, and (4) our call is to children.

Children are precious to God.
Our scriptures give us many examples of children as precious to God. III Nephi describes Jesus' visit to the Nephites and Lamanites. He was preaching and he asked that the children be brought to him. He blessed them and said,

“Behold your little ones.” And as they looked to behold, they cast their eyes toward heaven, and they saw the heavens open, and they saw angels descending out of heaven, as it were in the midst of fire; and they came down and encircled those little ones; And they were encircled with fire; and the angels ministered to them.⁷

In this passage, Jesus not only blessed the multitude, but he singled out the children. Compare this text with the story of Pentecost described in Acts 2. The Christians were gathered, and a fire from heaven came down on them. They spoke in different languages, each understanding what was said. Peter quoted the prophet Joel saying, “In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.”⁸ In III Nephi and Acts 2, children are singled out as both purposeful and precious.

Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore talks about motherhood as a way to understand the precious nature of children. In her book Also a Mother, she sums up how the church should regard them.

I am identifying what children in themselves offer to the world, not because they need to, but because children are good gifts to the world. Throughout the discussion, my assumption is that children are valuable in themselves, for their own sake, simply because they are.⁹

She demonstrates Jesus’ I-thou relationship¹⁰ with children by reminding us, “From a theological perspective…children are not products or private property: children are gifts. About this, Jesus is clear. Nowhere else in scripture or in mythic literature are children invited in, affectionately embraced, and blessed.”¹¹

Oh God, help us to be worthy of the children You
have entrusted to our care. Amen¹²

All Children Are God’s Children.
In Mark 9:33-37, Jesus states that in order to welcome him, one must welcome God’s children.

Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, "Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me."¹³

In this passage, Mark taught that welcoming Jesus means welcoming the child, and in welcoming the child, one welcomes God. This means welcoming every child: the ugly child, the stupid child, the loud child, the black child, the non-English speaking child, the angry child, the poor child, the abused child, and the dirty child. In denying these children, Jesus is denied.

Through Jesus' actions, the scriptures teach that every Christian has a role in welcoming the child into their company. Miller-McLemore deepens our understanding of Jesus’ radical welcome of children.

Jesus "seems genuinely to want the physical presence of children, their company."¹⁴ Caring for children is lifted up as a privilege [emphasis added] which God entrusted to adults. Adults are temporary, but essential intermediaries of divine care, and recipients of an invaluable, irreplaceable charge.¹⁵  

Miller-McLemore argues the privilege of caring for children extends to the larger community. It is imperative to the healthy and happy development of a child to have “othermothers” in their lives.¹⁶ “They literally clamor for a wider range of social relationships than this problematic division of private and public generativity allows…Even small children, I am convinced, who live within a relatively limited sphere of intimate bonds, need many caring ‘parents,’ rather than just one, or even two.”¹⁷ The Western view that a mother is only responsible for her own children is in direct opposition to God’s call to welcoming all children as one’s own. Miller-McLemore’s idea of universal motherhood is a restatement of the old adage, “It takes a village to raise a child.” This is the message of Jesus to the church about children.

O God, we pray for our children and family members and for our neighbors’ children. Help us God, to remember that all Your people are our neighbors and all their children are our own.
Amen¹⁸

Children Have a Privileged Place in God’s Community.
Two scriptural stories point to the specific gifts children bring to a community. First, Mark 10 tells the story of parents bringing their children to Jesus for blessing. The disciples tried to stop them, possibly thinking the children too insignificant for Jesus’ time. Jesus scolded his disciples in Mark 10:12, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” Isaiah 11:6 is also an important scripture to understand a child’s place in the community. It tells that the lion will lie down with the lamb and a little child shall lead them.

Why is being child-like imperative to entering the Kingdom of God? How can childtrn, in their limited experience, be spiritual leaders? These questions can be answered by considering the gifts of children. Miller-McLemore attempts to list some of these.

The very presence of children, overflowing with expressed and unexpressed human needs and proficiencies, provokes elemental questions about one’s philosophy of life. Children see what adults have long since failed to note. They ask questions, thousands of questions, that challenge the way life is lived. They attend religiously to the world’s creations: moon, water, sand, fireflies, thunderstorms, are greeted with a certain respect and intrigue.¹⁹

As with all of us, God takes a child’s liabilities and uses them for his purposes. By the sheer nature of the age, experience, and innocence, children are prophets.

Miller-McLemore also talks about how children teach us to love and give us the opportunity to practice the love of the Kingdom. “In caring for a child, as in caring intimately for any human being, one may glimpse the divine within creation. Seeing God in the face of the child opens the eyes to the face of God in those around us.”²⁰ Children lead us if we let them. They exemplify the messianic message of Luke 4:18: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.” Children bring us good news about the things we are moving too fast to experience. They free us from the prison of self-centeredness and self-indulgement. They cure our blindness by pointing out the beauty in the world that we, in our "grown-up" world, have forgotten to look for. They provide us with the opportunity to proclaim and practice our love freely. In this way, children lead us to through the doors of God’s Kingdom.

Dear God,
Who draws the line around the countries?
Nan

Dear God,
I wish there wasn’t no such thing of sin. I wish that there was not no such thing of war.
Tim M., age 9

 Dear God,
I think about you sometimes even when I’m not praying.
Elliott

 Dear God,
I don’t ever feel alone since I found out about you.
Nora

 Dear God,
I didn’t think orange went with purple until I saw the sunset you made on Tue.
That was cool.
Eugene

 Dear God,
I am doing the best I can.
Frank²¹

Our Call is to Children.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.”  If Luke 4:18 describes what children bring to a community, it can also be used as a rallying call to bring about God’s community. It is time for children to experience the liberating power of the love of God. Perhaps Adrian Thatcher says it best: “the Christian faith is the gift and practice of liberation. Liberation is the experience of deliverance from all kinds of sin, whether individual and personal, or social and structural, through the victory over sin secured for all of us by Jesus Christ.”²²

Adrian Thatcher, in his book Marriage after Modernity, focuses on the oppression children experience when deprived of a long-term relationship with both parents.²³ Author Stephanie Coontz, in her book The Way We Really Are, discusses the oppression children experience when their families struggle against poverty and the child’s needs take backstage to the family’s need for survival.²⁴ Children experience oppression in many ways. It is our call as the Christian community to free them from the bondages of poverty, violence, poor health, and unstable relationships.²⁵

Marian Wright Edelman sounds the prophetic call to Christians. She writes,

Child poverty is not an act of God. It is America’s moral and political choice about how we will treat vulnerable children whom the prophets and Gospels tell us are the apple of God’s eye. Christians believe God entered human history as a poor and vulnerable baby, not as a rich and powerful magnate or defense contractor or political leader or child of privilege, and that each man, woman, and child is a sacred creation shaped in God’s image and likeness, a sister and brother.²⁶

O God, by faith, like Noah, let us heed Your signs and warning and build sturdy arks to rescue our children from the coming floods.

 By faith, like Moses, let us leave Pharaoh’s house and head across the wilderness to lead our oppressed children to freedom.

 By faith, like the child David, let us go out without fear to face the Goliaths of our day with slingshots of righteousness and justice, confident of Your divine guidance and protection.
Amen²⁷

Application
I began this paper by pointing out the failure of the world to make children a priority. Through a theology of children, I asserted that God calls the church to stand against the world and make children a main concern. Though the world is fallen in its responsibility to children, it is redeemable through the love of God and the hope of Christian community.

Let’s look once again at Luke 4:18. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” If we use Jesus as a model for community transformation, we may begin to see hope for the children of the world.

Bring Good News to the Poor.
According to the Children’s Defense fund 11.6 million children live below the poverty line in the United States.²⁸ The number of these children living in working families is increasing. For children, living in poverty means poor nutrition, poor or no housing, unsafe, dirty neighborhoods, and substandard schools.

Coontz outlines some of the difficulties faced by families living in poverty.

Consider that the number of underweight infants seen at hospitals rises sharply in the three months after the coldest snap of winter, in what Dr. Deborah Franks calls the ‘heat-or-eat,’ choice that many poor families have to make.²⁹ Actually, the size of people’s bank account has a lot to do with what type of home they can provide, which is turn has a tremendous impact on children’s health and well-being.³⁰

Children who live in poverty struggle to survive in a nation where so many can not only afford a home but many luxuries as well.

What good news can the church share with these children? Not just the love of God but the love of a committed Christian community, willing to walk with them in their struggle to survive. Individual church members are called to become active in organizations such as the Children’s Defense Fund that will help them become educated on the issues facing children and impact those issues through contact with their legislators. Corporate congregations need to move beyond the “child-saving” approaches of soup kitchens and adopt-a-family-programs for the holidays. Middle-class suburban congregations need to realize they may need to step out their safe communities to partner with agencies and schools that serve poor children.

Proclaim Recovery of Sight.
Society is often blind to the pain and suffering of children. Luke 16:19-23 tells the story of a man who was blind to the pain of a fellow human being and what happened to him because he missed God’s call to help.

There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side.”

The rich man did nothing overtly wrong to Lazarus. He followed the current customs, laws, and expectations of his society. He was blinded by his rich lifestyle and could not see the suffering of another.³¹

The United States too is blinded by its riches and allows the suffering of children to continue. When this happens the whole nation descends into sin and despair. Jonathan Kozol, in his book Savage Inequalities, articulates these consequences clearly.

“Gifted children,” says Dr. Parks, “are everywhere in East St. Louis, but their gifts are lost to poverty and turmoil and the damage done by knowing they are written off by their society. Many of these children have no sense of something they belong to. They have no feeling of belonging to America. Gangs provide the boys, perhaps, with something to belong to…”³²

It is the task of the church to let children know they belong to the kingdom. It is also the task of the church to be a prophetic voice and tear the blinders from the eyes of God’s people. Only in seeing and responding to the pain of children will redemption occur.

Free the Oppressed.
God calls us to free children from oppression. In talking about oppression, one key is the disparity in educational opportunities in our society. Some children go to broken-down school buildings, are taught by poorly trained teachers, and live in underfunded school districts. Kozol discusses this eloquently.³³ Because school districts are funded through a tax base, low-income neighborhoods receive less money to educate their children. Wealthy districts adopt policies of “local control” which Kozol states is really the “…freedom to choose which of the children’s need should be denied” for the poorer districts.

Kozol argues that in many ways this sets up two educational systems. One system is for the poor to become janitors and gardeners. The other system is for the rich to become doctors and presidents. In order to end this oppression, Christian communities must ensure that all children have the same opportunities for education.

Alain Jehlen in her article, “No More ‘Poor’ Schools,” talks about how some wealthy districts are working with poor districts to create opportunities for everyone.³⁴ Instead of desegregating based on race, the districts are integrating according to socio-economic class. Though some parents have worried that their middle-class children will pick up objectionable habits from the lower-income children, quite the opposite has proven true. “Many low-income students pick up higher expectations. Many more affluent students learn about the world around them, while maintaining their own academic progress.”

The church is called, once again, to be that prophetic voice, to not allow some children to be trained to be employed while others are trained to employ, to stand against this injustice and end the oppression of our children.

Conclusion
A theology of children is imperative to the church in these times of struggle. In living out this theology the church becomes the prophetic action needed to answer God’s call. In recognizing that children are precious to God, the church can demonstrate that children are precious to us. In claiming that all children are God’s children, the church can become a community prepared to meet the diverse needs of a hurting world. In becoming aware of the child’s privileged place in God’s community, the church can be sensitive to the leadership of children and be enriched by it. In answering our call to children, the church takes responsibility for seeing the gospel lived out in the world.

In his book The Powers That Be, Walter Wink tells this story,³⁵

My friend Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer once found himself walking through the streets of Calcutta, so enraged by the poverty that he wanted to scream at God, "How can you allow such suffering?" The he came to a painful realization: "In the suffering of the poor God was screaming at me, in fact at all of us and at our institutions and social systems that cause and perpetuate hunger, poverty, and inequality."³⁶

The world has not lived up to God’s call to love, protect, and nurture children. Millions of children live in poverty, are denied educational opportunities, become victims of systems that were designed to help them, get bombarded with violent images, have no access to quality health care, and lack the familial or community supports to guide them in their growth. The church has a prophetic task to call the world into accountability for these failures or it too will suffer the pain of a future generation’s denial of what is righteous.

Lord, we have pushed so many of our children into the tumultuous sea of life in leaky boats without survival gear.

Forgive us and help them to forgive us. Help us now to give all children the anchor of faith, the rudder of hope, the sails of education, and the paddles of family to keep them going when life’s sea get rough.
Amen³⁷

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¹For a more detailed report, see Marian Wright Edelman, “America’s Fifth Child,” State of America’s Children 2000 (2000), xvi.

²Ibid.

³Barbara Finkelstein, “A Crucible of Contradictions: Historical Roots of Violence Against Children in the United States,” Public Assault on American’s Children: Poverty, Violence, and Juvenile Injustice, Valerie Polakow, ed. (Williston, Vermont: Teachers College Press, 2000), 21. Barbara Finkelstein is the director of the International Center for the Study of Education Policy and Human Values at the University of Maryland, College Park.

⁴Ibid., 30.

⁵www.gmfc.org.

⁶www.unicef.org.

⁷III Nephi 8:24-26.

⁸Acts 2:17 NRSV.

⁹Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Also a Mother (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 154

¹⁰See Martin Buber, I and Thou, (Touchstone, 1970). Martin Buber distinguishes between two types of relationships, “I-it” and “I-thou.” I-it relationships are relationships between a person and a thing or a person treating another person as a thing. I-thou relationships are characterized by mutuality.

¹¹Miller-McLemore, 168. This refers to Mark 10 not III Nephi.

¹²Marian Wright Edelman, Guide My Feet (New York: Harpercollins, 1995), 4.

¹³Mark 9:36-37 NRSV.

¹⁴Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 82.114.

¹⁵Miller-McLemore, 168.

¹⁶Ibid., 171. "Othermothers" refer to women who assist blood-mothers in child rearing responsibilities and develop strong emotional bonds to the child.

¹⁷Ibid., 169.

¹⁸Edelman, Guide My Feet, 110.

¹⁹Miller-McLemore, 156.

²⁰Ibid., 158.

²¹Stuart Hample and Eric Marshall, comp., Children’s Letters to God (New York: Workman Publishing, 1991).

²²Adrian Thatcher, Marriage after Modernity (New York University Press), 132.

²³Ibid.

²⁴Coontz, 146.

²⁵This is not to say that I am in support of taking children from their families. We need to provide families with support to meet the struggles that prevent them from be whole and healthy.

²⁶Edelman, “America’s Fifth Child,” xii.

²⁷Edelman, Guide My Feet, 56.

²⁸www.childrensdefense.org.

²⁹Perri Klass, “Tackling Problems We Thought We Solved,” New York Times Magazine, December 13, 1992, 62; Robert A. Hahn, Elaine Eaker, Nancy D. Barker, Steven M. Teutsch, Waldemar Sosniak, and Nancy Krieger, “Poverty and Death in the United States - 1973 and 1991,” Epidemiology 6 (1995), 490.

³⁰Coontz, 148.

³¹Donald Kraybill, The Upside-Down Kingdom (Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1990), 112.

³²Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 33-34.

³³Ibid. chapter 6.

³⁴Alain Jehlen, “No More ‘Poor’ Schools,” NEA Today )October 2001), 8.

³⁵Walter Wink, The Powers that Be (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 199.

³⁶Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, Hunger for Justice (Maryknoll, NY.: Orbis Books, 1980), vii.

³⁷Edelman, Guide My Feet, 87.

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Selected Bibliography

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. New York: Touchstone, 1970.

Coles, Robert. The Spiritual Life of Children. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990.

Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Really Are. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

Edelman, Marian Wright. Guide My Feet. New York: Harper Collins, 1995. 

___________. “America’s Fifth Child: It’s Time to End Child Poverty in America,” State of America’s Children 2000. The Children’s Defense Fund, 2000.

Hample, Stuart and Eric Marshall, eds, Children’s Letters to God. New York: Workman Publishing, 1991.

Jehlen, Alain. “No More ‘Poor’ Schools,” NEA Today. vol. 20, no. 2. (October 2001).

Kozol, Jonathan. Savage Inequaltities: Children in America’s Schools. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.

Kotlowitz, Alex, There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing up in the Other America. New York: Doubleday, 1991.

Kraybill, Donald B. The Upside-Down Kingdom. Scottsdale: Herald Press, 1990.

Miller-McLemore, Bonnie. Also A Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma. Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1994.

Polakow, Valerie, ed. The Public Assault on America’s Children: Poverty, Violence and Juvenile Injustice. New York: Teachers College Press, 2000.

Thatcher, Adrain. Marriage After Modernity: Christian Marriage in Postmodern Times. New York: New York University Press, 1999.

Wallerstein, Judith S., Julie M. Lewis, and Sandra Blakeslee. The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark Study. New York: Hyperion, 2000.

Wink, Walter. The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millenium. New York: Doubleday, 1998.