Assistant Rector’s Note to the Parish: The True Vine Table, Starting the Service, and Worshiping Together
Starting after Easter, we have had a little experiment in the nave, the True Vine Table. This table is for anyone over age 6, and is especially for ages 6 to 9. You can read all the details in my letter to the parish from May. After getting feedback and talking amongst the staff, Rev. Megan decided to extend the experiment through to the start of November. This is because we need more information! Both Rev. Megan and I would love your feedback.
For the sake of the whole parish, I believe we need to find more ways of supporting children in worship. While I believe a table like this is a good approach, it may not be the best one, or it may not yet be in its best form. Together, we can find what works best for us. Your feedback and thoughts are how Rev. Megan will be able to make the most informed decision.
Another change has happened recently, which we wrote about in the weekly email. This is that we are starting our service a touch more purposefully, with the liturgical ministers for the day gathering for a prayer in the sacristy. I have noticed that it seems to invite all the adults, myself included, into a deeper silence as the service begins.
As adults, this parish is not a particularly silent bunch! I enjoy this. We are chatting with each other, whispering, talking in the hall or narthex, and neither the prelude nor the opening hymn tend to pause this. But in that situation, I think it’s unfair to expect children to magically know that a particular time of attention and quiet have begun! Children and young people learn to participate in rites and communities by watching the adults around them, and finding a place for themselves in what they see. If we hope that children will learn a reverent silence, a kind of stillness, the adults around them need to live it.
The great scholar and liturgical theologian, Aidan Kavanagh, OSB, wrote, “If [the Sunday liturgy] bores [children], it probably bores everyone else as well, and for the same reasons. This counsels that children may well be early and forceful witnesses to liturgical atrophy in their assembly, and that their witness should be taken seriously by all. Children learn much by vigorous ritual engagement, as Eric Erikson has pointed out. They learn perhaps even more by observing what ritual and liturgy do or do not do to adults, especially their parents, and to their peers and siblings. In view of this, children should never regularly be relegated to activities apart from the assembly’s liturgy . . .” (Elements of Rite: A Handbook of Liturgical Style, page 68).
I will quibble with Prof. Kavanagh by noting that children under 5 are especially watching their families, but children 6-12 are often even more intrigued by the adults outside of their family. Your inner stillness (or your reverent fidgeting!) are doing more for children than you think.
Ways that you already support children in worship:
Smiling or waving at them and their adults
Taking them and their concerns seriously
Enjoying their participation, as they sing and move and carry up the gifts or stand at the altar
Introducing yourself to their adults before or after the service and say you’re happy to see them
Taking our worship and our community life seriously
Other ways you can support children in worship:
Use every movement possible in the liturgy so they see something they can do too: bow during the Sanctus, cross yourself at the Gospel and the epiclesis, turn to watch the cross as it passes by at the end of the service.
If you are lucky enough to be sitting near a child, lower your bulletin a little and point where we are in the service.
Like you, I hope that in the coming years our parish will welcome more people of all ages into this community. Our children—and the children we haven’t met yet!—depend on your compassion, respect, and curiosity. Being around children is a gift, and my prayer is that we will continue to be blessed with the presence of children!