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.
It was Christmas Eve. The children had made the journey to Bethlehem, up one aisle and down another in the candlelight, picking up a donkey and a cow and Mary and Joseph and sheep and shepherds on the way. Now they sat by the crèche looking up at the Advent wreath. The Christ candle flamed — Jesus is born! — and one little boy leapt up at the sight of the light (Oh! Oh!) and flung up his arms and said, “Glory to God!”
“Let the little children come to me, do not prevent them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these” (Mark 10:14).
The church needs children. They are transparent, still, to the wonder of God; it shines in their eyes on Christmas Eve and in the hush with which they listen to the knocking on the old inn door. Will there be room? Will the Child find a place in the inn, in our hearts? In their hush I too see again the mystery, this grace of God Almighty, tabernacling now among us in the babe.
There is plenty of room in our churches these days. Yet there are few children. Many western “mainline” churches, especially the Anglican churches, are not unique in this regard.. We are merely following the trend. In the United States, in Europe, in Australia, in China — and in parts of Africa, too — birthrates are falling or have already fallen or will soon fall below replacement levels.
My country, Canada, has just joined the world’s top five least-fertile nations. It turns out that the pop wisdom of my childhood (Population explosion! Don’t have more babies! The earth cannot sustain the billions that will be born!) was dead wrong, and our numbers are imploding instead. If there are fewer children in your churches, that is because there are fewer children.
This is sometimes true despite couples’ deep desire to have children. And it is sometimes the parents’ choice, “one and done” in the current catchphrase, or indeed none, for the sake of freedom, travel, house, “lifestyle choices.” It is the parents’ choice but also a societal choice, a way of thinking embedded in young people by a culture that has turned for meaning to the individual in absolute autonomy.
Is this lack of (freedom from!) children neutral, fine for those who want it? Demographers don’t think so. Neither do the nations. They are, I discovered as I tried to get a handle on the question, in something of a panic. “China going door-to-door” to convince women to have more children, one headline read. Too few children means too few workers, too few consumers, too few new dollars in pension and Social Security funds, too few new ideas, a gradual graying out of a people’s hope and energy.
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Robert Noyce, innovators in the “digital revolution,” all “have one thing in common: when they came up with … [their] breakthrough, they were young” (Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline [Signal/McLelland & Stewart, 2019], p. 83). Is the child-free home, life, world neutral? For quite practical reasons, the nations do not think so.
Jesus does not think so either.
His reason is more radical: it is children to whom the kingdom of God belongs. They show us the way. “Unless you receive the kingdom of God as a little child, you will never come into it,” Jesus says (Mark 10:15).
Maybe it is their wonder, the way they leap up at the Christ candle’s flaming — “Oh! Oh!” — and for a moment we see it too, the glory of it, the breathtaking grace in the face of the newborn Son of God. Maybe it is their play, the 3- and 4- and 10-year-olds beating their drums during the children’s song and whooping and careening around the parish hall after worship. Maybe it is their radical need, because for all her mighty personhood, a little one must be held in our arms. For all  her liveliness, a child is waiting to be taught, watching her mother’s lips with a penetrating gaze, and then out tumble those gospel words.
“And Jesus took them in his arms and blessed them” (Mark 10:16).
Jesus would take us all in his arms; he would bless us all; he would lay his hands upon each one of us, if we would only, in the great wide world, come to him, to his Word, his teaching, his grace, his cross. But in the press of the world’s many voices, we are not always very good at coming to him. We need children, gazing in wonder at the Christ candle, practically running up to Communion to stretch out their hands to him — we need children to show us the way.
And children need the church. They need Jesus, for the obvious reason that he is their life, their joy, their truth, their way. And they need the church in which Jesus is found, where among the people gathered in his name he has promised to be.
That children need the church is more and more true, for quite concrete reasons. Where else, now, do random unrelated people of all ages, all interests, various politics and classes and ethnicities come together, work and pray and sing and walk together, to learn to love and serve not only our Lord, but each other? In a siloed world, the church brings us together. In a time of smaller and geographically distant families, the church provides “grandparents” for children and “grandchildren” for aging, grandchildren-less parents.
So too, the church is a place of bodies. It is irreducibly embodied. At its very center there is bread and wine, body and blood, and hands lifted to receive these gifts. There is kneeling side-by-side on Good Friday in front of a wooden cross and the scrape of metal on flint, the whoosh of new fire in the darkness on the night of the Resurrection.
In our digital age, Jonathan Haidt has said, children’s lives are increasingly disembodied: virtual, asynchronous, isolated, reduced to a six-inch screen. All day they tap. They are, Haidt says, “deprived of childhood” (The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness [Penguin, 2024] 60) They need real, knit-together, enduring community, not the perilous in-groups of the influencers. They need play.
In this time the church has something to offer, to all of us in an increasingly fragmented, siloed, disembodied life, but especially to the children. There is nothing more real than worship, the gathered people and prayer and song of the church. “And he blessed them and laid his hands upon them.” Children need the church. Quite possibly they need nothing more. And we need children, who teach us the joy of Christ.
Certainly, there are outliers that buck the trend, but in my western and Anglican context, children are largely absent. Why are they not here? It is not because we do not have the right programs for them. An anecdote: in the Roman Catholic parish church I occasionally attend when we visit my daughter in Washington DC, the children sit in church – three, four, eight to a pew – throughout the Mass. (It is possible that this is the only community in the DC area that is defying the plummeting birth rate.) They go – present themselves, integrate their children – because that is what people do in that community. They get married, they have children, and they take them to church. They gather, and worship.
The children are not here, in the Anglican Church here in Canada at least, in part because of choices we have made as a church. We have come to a place where we – in lockstep with our culture – instinctively situate the individual qua individual at the center of things, that is, at that center where Jesus, if the cross and resurrection are true, needs to stand. We have, in other words, a new axis to turn around; we have replaced God with ourselves.
This turn inward on ourselves, incurvatus in se (to borrow from Martin Luther), has had visible ramifications for marriage, for the family, and for the presence of children in our lives. High divorce rates, casual sex, marriages of any-gendered partners and now multiple partners (polyamory): these markers of our culture are rooted in the turn to the individual and her autonomy, identity, desire; it is a world self-creating, self-sustaining, without reference to an external and divinely defined sense of purpose and vocation in our lives, specifically in our sexual expressions and understanding of the purposes of God’s institution of marriage. This explains that phrase, heard in my western context, “one and done.” This may even (and more troublingly) devolve into, “none at all.” Either way, the principal concern is the sake of my lifestyle. Here again we see the positioning of individual qua individual at the center. This is the choice we have made, and not merely in the wider culture, but within the life of the church. This is now our creed, despite those haunting words of Jesus, “Let the children come to me.”
The church has something to offer children. In the Incarnate Jesus Christ and his ecclesial body the church has the greatest possible offering to make our children: a community embodied, present, lifting up hands and voices together in song and prayer, caring for each other and the world. But we cannot offer it except in Jesus Christ. We cannot offer it unless we can be different, unless we can speak Christ at the center of things, and the child in his arms, and not the world’s great “me.” If we can be different, if we can speak Christ, then – “glory!” the child can say, at the sight of the Christ candle; “glory!” we can say in reply.
The Rev. Catherine Sider-Hamilton, PhD is a Guest Writer. She teaches New Testament and Greek at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto and serves as Priest-in-Charge of St. Matthew’s Anglican Church in the Riverdale neighborhood of Toronto. She is the author or editor of several works, including The Death of Jesus in Matthew: Innocent Blood and the End of Exile (Cambridge University Press, 2017).