Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a series on Natality, a conversation about child-bearing, family life, birth rates, and the presence or absence of children in churches.
Natality refers to the essential human fact of being born, of giving birth, and of the children who come to be from these realities. Natality in this sense is of central concern to the Christian, and it is wrapped up in the Christian faith. We affirm our faith in both a Creator God who gave us the gift of life, and in his Son, our Savior Jesus Christ, who in his assumption of our human nature, including our mortal flesh, underwent a human birth.
Other essays in this series consider the wide demographic changes that are affecting natality, and the moral and theological implications of these changes. Here, I want to address a straightforward practical aspect of fostering and encouraging natality: parenthood, and the church’s relationship to it, as reflected in our baptismal covenant and the quality of our shared apostolic life.
In an era when having children is optional, doing so is a sign of hope — hope in the future; hope in the potential flourishing of the next generation; and for Christians a sign of hope in God and trust in his providential care for their offspring. Hope and trust are necessary because, post-Fall, responding to God’s call to “go forth and multiply” is not so straightforward; its joys are laced with risk, sacrifice, and the anxiety of the unknown.
Adults considering whether to have children, or how many to have, face a variety of obstacles that might discourage them from doing so, and they shouldn’t be dismissed lightly. There is a balancing act in affirming the goodness of having children while respecting the discernment of those who forgo having children, or those who hesitate to do so. They are “counting the cost,” a cost that takes more than one form.
There is most obviously the financial cost of raising a child; and the practical care, time, and energy that children need to flourish physically and relationally. Both of these costs are higher than they used to be; what are considered to be the “baseline” needs of a child have skyrocketed in every area of life.
In the second category of cost, many prospective parents have few people in their lives to offer practical care or relational support without a price. Given the long list of challenges and stresses the surgeon general named in his August 2024 advisory on the mental health and well-being of parents, it is little wonder adults would hesitate to wade into those murky waters, when they can easily opt out of parenthood.
Parents need supportive people around them not only to survive raising their children but to thrive; and yet “parental isolation and loneliness” is one of the factors identified by the surgeon general as affecting parents most, as well as Americans in all stages of life. See Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community (2023).
It is an irreducible fact about the human condition that we need each other; as God said early on in Genesis, “it is not good for the man to be alone,” and this human need for others extends beyond the need for a partner. Yet our residential mobility and current forms of technology steer us away from the development of real, embodied relationship that is sustained over time.
These circumstances form an opportunity for the church to rediscover and deepen its role as a community, one that fosters relational connections between generations and gives adults the courage to bring new life into the world, knowing that they are not alone. For those of us in the Anglican tradition, our baptismal liturgy makes several claims that speak to this cultural moment. The pattern of including a godparent in the baptism of a child recognizes that raising children in the Christian faith and life requires support beyond the nuclear family. This same truth is reflected in the call upon the congregation: “Will you who witness these vows do all in your power to support these persons in their life in Christ?”
I wonder how most folks in the pew would respond, if asked what this congregational promise means. Given that we spend so little time or energy unpacking the baptismal covenant in an educational or formational setting, I imagine most people would have a rather thin account of what this support could look like when fulfilled: perhaps sponsoring this child when it’s time for confirmation; providing some kind of meal service when new babies are born; or the church offering programs for children like Sunday school or vacation Bible school.
Any of those efforts are commendable ways to support children and their parents, and they can become opportunities for deeper relationship to form. However, in a time when loneliness and isolation are rampant, I am increasingly convinced that the church needs to lean more into its identity as a community. In this congregational promise, we are committing to support the child or children being baptized; but surely we are also committing to support the parents and godparents who make promises on their behalf. Our support takes on the distinct form of fostering their “life in Christ,” and one of the central ways the church does this is through being a community.
We need to go beyond services, programs, and classes to invite people into Christian community, where they are can live in relationship with others that are centered around their common identity as Christians, in which they give to and receive from each other.
Church as community is a lesser-emphasized theme within Anglican tradition than in other Christian contexts; however, the first way the catechism describes the church is as the “community of the New Covenant,” and the first of the five promises in the baptismal covenant acknowledges the role of the church as a community:
“Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?” This language comes directly from Acts 2:42, which describes the quality of the early Christians’ and what they did together. They ate meals together; they devoted themselves to praying together, they shared what they had in common; and as Acts 6 describes, they discerned and then met each other’s practical needs.
These are the practices we are recommitting to every time we baptize new members of our community. These are the practices that form and reinforce Christian community; and they can directly ease isolation and loneliness, both for parents and for Christians of other ages. As clunky as I find this evangelical phrase, having other families with whom we are “doing life” (as well as people in other stages of life) can go a long way toward sustaining parents in the hard work of raising children.
These practices described in Acts 2 are simple to understand but hard to do. Most of us would prefer to have some snazzy program that packages how to make Christian community instantly spring forth within our context. But both Scripture and our prayer book set forth the essentials of what Christian community looks like, the kind that has the power to form friendships and familial bonds within the church: shared meals, common prayer, and efforts to meet each other’s needs.
This is no silver bullet for the daunting challenges facing parents, and it does not cancel out the need to count the cost before deciding to have children. But in this cultural moment, it is time for us to embrace the assumption our Anglican tradition makes, that parents are part of a larger church community that helps them fulfill the promise they made at their children’s baptism, to bring up their children not only in the Christian faith, but in the Christian life (BCP, 302). This quality of Christian community, if cultivated within our parishes, can inspire the sort of hope needed to take the leap into parenthood.
The Rev. Sarah Puryear lives in Nashville with her family and serves as priest associate at St. George’s Episcopal Church.