Listening to Children on the Spiritual Journey: Guidance for Those Who Teach and Nurture

By Catherine Stonehouse and Scottie May

How do children experience and understand God? How can adults help children grow their life of faith? Throughout more than a decade of field research, children's spirituality experts Catherine Stonehouse and Scottie May listened to children talk about their relationships with God, observed children and their parents in learning and worship settings, and interviewed adults about their childhood faith experiences. This accessibly written book weaves together their findings to offer a glimpse of the spiritual responsiveness and potential of children. Through case studies, it provides insight into children's perceptions of God and how they process their faith. In addition, the book suggests how parents, teachers, and ministry leaders can more effectively relate to and work with children and pre-adolescents to nurture their faith, offering a helpful picture of adults and children on the spiritual journey together.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Jun 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781441212030

Catherine Stonehouse

Catherine Stonehouse is Orlean Bullard Beeson Professor ofChristian Education at Asbury Theological Seminary,Wilmore, Kentucky.

Book preview

Listening to

Children

on the

Spiritual Journey

Listening to

Children

on the

Spiritual Journey

Guidance for Those Who Teach and Nurture

Catherine Stonehouse & Scottie May

© 2010 by Catherine Stonehouse and Scottie May

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.bakeracademic.com

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stonehouse, Catherine.

     Listening to children on the spiritual journey : guidance for those who teach and nurture / Catherine Stonehouse and Scottie May.

      p. cm.

   Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

    ISBN 978-0-8010-3236-3 (pbk.)

   1. Church work with children. 2. Christian children—Religious life. I. May, Scottie. II. Title.

   BV639.C4S775 2010

  268 .432—dc22

2009046907

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations labeled TNIV are from the Holy Bible, Today’s New International Version®. TNIV®. Copyright © 2001, 2005 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations labeled NKJV are from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations labeled NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the children

who have blessed us as we

worshiped and learned together.

And to our students from

Asbury Theological Seminary and

Wheaton College and Graduate School

who invest their lives in ministry

with children and families,

listening to children and parents as they

journey together.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Why Listen to Children?

2. Knowing God in Childhood

3. Experiencing God in Everyday Life

4. Experiencing God at Church

5. The Formative Power of God’s Story

6. Let the Children Come: Loving, Knowing, and Following Jesus

7. Celebrating Compassion

8. The Church Partnering with Parents

Appendix A: The Research Designs

Appendix B: Resources and Ideas

Notes

Acknowledgments

You have heard the claim, It takes a village to raise a child. Well, a whole village is not needed to write a book about listening to children on the spiritual journey. But it did take a good-sized team, and we want to express our appreciation to those who contributed so significantly.

First, Thank you! to the forty children who participated in the Listening to Children research study. They entered whole-heartedly into the interview process, providing insights and understandings for us to share in the pages that follow.

We also thank the parents who allowed us to interview their children one, two, and even three times and who participated in the interview process themselves. They gave us a glimpse of spiritual formation in the family, how it took place in their homes, the challenges, and the rewards. Pastors Dean Cook, Daryl Diddle, Richard Stevenson, and Ken Houp granted permission for us to contact families in their congregations and continue the study over seven years. We greatly appreciate their support for this research.

I (Cathy) am also indebted to Laura Hunter, Lenore Sweigard, and Dwight Winters, who assisted with all three rounds of interviews with the children. They invested many hours, and their excitement for the project offered great encouragement. It was a joy to work with them and celebrate what we were hearing from the boys and girls. Barbara Jaeger took on the task of transcribing interview tapes. She invested 206 hours in that task, providing us with quality transcripts from the first set of interviews for our study.

Several Asbury Seminary students have assisted along the way, interviewing parents (Becky Gardner Todd and Shannon Fredres), coding transcripts for data analysis (Darlene Hyatt), additional transcribing (Johanna Truesdale), and checking the final manuscript prior to submission to the publisher (Alison Wright). I deeply appreciate the contribution of each person and have been enriched by teaming with them in this project. I also want to thank Asbury Theological Seminary and its sabbatical policy that gave me significant blocks of time for research and writing.

Research at its best is not a solitary task. I (Scottie) am very grateful for the input and help I received in these projects from Wheaton College students. Assistants in the Good Shepherd Research were graduate students Maria Chase, Amy Long, and Jennifer Wilson. For the Good Shepherd Family Research, I was assisted by Kathryn Christenson, John Hall, and Chi Meei Ngo. We had wonderful times praying together, creating and gathering materials, and then being blessed by the experiences right along with the participants. I am grateful for the contributions these friends made to the recording and analyses of our findings.

Special thanks go to the children and parents of Blanchard Alliance Church who took part in these studies, for the parents who gave permission for their children to be part of the Good Shepherd Research, and for the families who willingly gave ten Sunday afternoons to come together to participate in the Good Shepherd Family Research. Your encouragement and feedback have been very helpful.

One of the many delights of this research and writing is the pleasure of collegial work. At the core of this pleasure is the privilege we (Cathy and Scottie) have had of working together. We have enjoyed the blessing of friendship, have each been enriched through the wisdom of the other, and have been encouraged by our shared passion for the spiritual potential and nurture of children.

The team at Baker Academic has been great. Thanks to Robert Hosack, acquisitions editor, who believed in the book concept and patiently encouraged us during the writing process. Jeffery Wittung served us well, investing his editing skills in fine tuning our work and efficiently moving the manuscript along toward publication, until his untimely death in January of 2010. We deeply appreciate the way in which Robert Hand has led the process of pulling everything together and carrying Listening to Children on the Spiritual Journey across the finish line. We are grateful to each of these people.

Introduction

Two-year-old Elijah, whose mother is a ministry leader, had heard the word holy at church but also through the media in the phrase holy cow. Even at his tender age, this confused him. One day he asked several times, What is ‘holy’? Mom patiently responded as carefully as possible, trying to be age appropriate. She said:

So when I finally think his curiosity must be satisfied, we’re sitting there sharing a banana chocolate muffin, and he grabs my neck with his little arm and pulls my face close, saying, Mama, let’s talk. I am surprised but say, What do you want to talk about? He puts his face very close to mine and says very seriously, WHAT IS ‘HOLY’? He repeated the exact same thing three more times and listened very closely each time as I thought of every example I could that he could relate to.

Another day Elijah (he calls himself Yiya) ran over to comfort his crying baby sister by patting her tummy and softly saying that he was right there with her. When his mother affirmed his actions, he looked up at her and said simply, Yiya is like Jesus.¹ Who would have thought that a two-year-old would be interested in What is ‘holy’ or see his caring actions as being like Jesus? Listening to children often leads to amazement. For us, listening to children like Elijah and many others has also fueled the desire to better understand the spirituality of children and how parents and faith communities can participate with them as they come to know God and grow in their life of faith. Our search for understanding has led us into the research projects that are behind this book.

In the following pages you will find insights from research conducted by both authors. Our studies emerged from similar motivations but at different times and in varied settings. As we worked together on other projects we often shared examples from our research findings. In time, we realized that the insights from our various studies could be woven together to provide what we trust will be a helpful picture of children and adults on the faith journey together. In the chapters that follow we endeavor to weave that tapestry for you.

This introduction briefly describes the research studies to familiarize you with our processes and hopefully to make your reading of the book flow more smoothly. We also include a brief description of an approach to ministry with children, which we call Reflective Engagement, and a chapter-by-chapter overview of what is to come.

Overview of Research

The Listening to Children Study

After many years of enjoying children, studying their development, and learning from the research of others, I (Cathy) decided to begin a research project that would set the stage for me to listen to children and learn from them directly. Since 1991 I had worshiped regularly with children using Young Children and Worship by Sonja Stewart and Jerome Berryman as a guide.² This approach to worship invites children to be in a special place with God, leads them into the Scripture to worship and reflect, and gives the children time and quiet to be with God and respond to God. Berryman calls this approach to worship Godly Play.³ Watching children respond to God and hearing parents tell how their child carried that response out of the church into life kindled my desire to learn more from the children about the influence of Godly Play on their spirituality. I wanted to see whether there is any difference in the spirituality of children who have participated in Godly Play and those who have not. And beyond that, I wanted to learn from the children how they experienced and understood or imagined God.

I began my research in the summer of 1998 with forty children between the ages of five and ten. They were selected from two churches in the same community. Interviewers spent two hours with each child, engaging them in a variety of activities designed to give the children opportunity to talk with us about God and the Bible. They shared their experiences of feeling God close, talking to God, and hearing God speak to them. They told us their favorite Bible stories, drew pictures of God and Jesus, and told us about their pictures. You may be wondering, why would you ask a child to do the impossible, draw a picture of God? Let me explain the purpose of that activity.

Mary handed her four-year-old daughter a sheet of paper and a box of crayons. Honey, would you draw me a picture of God? she asked. I can’t draw a picture of God on that, Esther replied. Why not? her mother asked. God’s too big. With that response, Mary turned the paper to a vertical position in front of Esther, and she began to draw. When finished, God’s crown touched the top of the page and God’s feet touched the bottom (fig. I.1). Through her picture and comments, Esther lets us see God through her eyes. Her God is big and is the King. Also, Esther’s God has dark skin, like herself and her Kenyan family and friends.⁴

If Mary had simply asked, What is God like? I wonder what Esther would have been able to tell her. Early in my attempts to listen to children and help them talk with me about their God thoughts, I discovered that often my direct questions brought no thoughts to a child’s mind, even though later I discovered they knew some profound things about God. Children sometimes astound us with insightful comments about God that seem to come out of the blue. But when we initiate spiritual conversations with them so that we can listen to their thoughts, we usually need some means for guiding them into reflection and expression. Drawing a picture of God often seems to facilitate such thinking and makes sharing those thoughts possible. Some of the most profound comments from the children in our research came as they talked about their pictures.

A brief conversation with a child in a structured setting provides at best only a glimpse of the child’s spirituality. Some children will not choose to share in such a setting, and for others, the activities do not bring to mind their deep thoughts and feelings. Realizing this, we decided to also interview parents to see what they could tell us about their child’s spiritual life. Without knowing what their children had shared in their interviews, the parents provided interesting insights to complement those gathered from the children.

Three-and-a-half years after the first interviews, we met again with nineteen of the children and listened to them talk about God and share their reflections on Bible stories. In the fall of 2005, seven years after those first conversations, twenty-one of the children—most of them teenagers by then—participated in a third round of interviews. The voices you will hear from the Listening to Children Study are the voices of children between five and seventeen years of age, and you will listen to their thoughts across seven years of their childhood and adolescence. Their parents will also provide insights as they reflect on the journey they share with their children. For ease in communication, throughout the book we will refer to this research as the Listening to Children Study. (The endotes and appendix A provide a more detailed description of the research.)

Adult Reflections Study

One afternoon, many years ago, an acquaintance asked me (Scottie) when I had become a Christian. I responded that I didn’t know. He then queried: Well, when were you saved?

My answer was the same: I don’t know. How can you know you’re a Christian if you don’t remember when you were saved? he asked. I have no idea when I became a Christian, but I have no doubt that I am! I have a growing relationship with God and share in his gift of eternal life through Jesus, was my startled reply.

That conversation clearly showed me that some Christians have assumptions about how a person should come to faith in Christ. According to my friend’s categories, my faith experience was not valid. But I knew it was. Subsequently, I began noting what people said about faith experiences, particularly those of children. Here are a couple of the things I heard from adults: I clearly remember asking Jesus to be my Savior when I was four years old, and I cannot remember a time when I didn’t love the Lord Jesus—I’ve always been a Christian. A parent once said to me, My kids get saved every year at Bible camp; they just want to make sure. I began to wonder if the differences in these views affected the faith journeys of these people later in life.

Investigating those different views became the object of the research for my doctoral studies. Differing theologies about original sin and the role of baptism are factors that characterize various denominations.⁵ Coming to faith practices can be categorized in ways that include conversion, nurture, or a combination of conversion/nurture. Because children are not able to articulate the long-term effects of their experiences, I interviewed twenty-seven volunteer adults between ages twenty-four and forty-five who said they had been Christians since childhood. I selected three evangelical churches of different denominations. The volunteers attended those churches even though their childhood churches represented a broader range of traditions. I recorded and analyzed their memories and feelings about their childhood faith experiences. A few weeks later I reinterviewed them to ensure that I understood correctly what they were reporting. When writing about this study in our book, we refer to it as the Adult Reflections Study. (Appendix A describes this study in greater detail.)

Good Shepherd Research

For several years I (Scottie) had been studying the work of Sofia Cavalletti and the way her reflective approach helps children experience God. That coupled with recent neurobiological insights about the important role of reflection in a child’s development led me to investigate the effect a slow, quiet, reflective environment might have on young children who had never before been part of that type of group experience. With the aid of three graduate students, we used an ordinary room in a church and added elements and materials to create a reflective, sacred space based on principles from Cavalletti as well as Stewart and Berryman (see chapter 4 for more details). For ten weeks we implemented a curriculum that introduced eighteen preschoolers to their Good Shepherd. After one week of orientation to this space, we found almost without exception that the children delighted in this reflective experience and responded very appropriately. We listened closely to them as we invited them to wonder and talk about life with the Good Shepherd. We also carefully watched them as they responded to the stories by working with various materials. Oftentimes what they created spoke more clearly than their words did about what they were thinking. It seemed to us that the children were actually yearning to be in a quiet, slow place such as this. Many of them expressed regret when the ten weeks ended. This listening task was rewarding for us.

We interviewed fourteen of the children individually two months after the experiment ended. Twelve of them beamed as soon as we mentioned our time together and told us of their memories—memories of the stories of the Good Shepherd and of the liturgy of light that we developed to end each session. Two of the children could not recall anything. Two years later we again spoke with twelve of the children. With a little prompting about how the space looked and what we did there, nine of them recalled those weeks together but with less specificity. In the book we will refer to this research as the Good Shepherd Research.

Good Shepherd Family Research

Because the impact of the children’s response to the above study seemed significant to us, we became curious to see if families from that same church would respond in a similar way. We realized that within many churches today children and parents rarely share experiences. This generational separation makes it difficult for parents to learn how to nurture their children spiritually, especially for those who did not grow up in Christian homes. What if we provided the same experience for parents and children together that we had done with preschoolers? Our curiosity was piqued. We planned a six-week series, again based on the parable of the Good Shepherd, that would take place in the same prepared environment. We invited six families to participate. That meant we would have twelve adults and twelve children ages three to ten. Because a couple of families had infants and toddlers, both of those parents were unable to attend together each week. The only changes we made to the environment were to add a journaling response area and also a few adult books related to shepherding to the reading area.

Although it was not as easy for the adults to slow themselves down as it was for the children, as the weeks progressed, the parents for the most part found themselves delighting in the pace and quietness of our times together. They expressed amazement at seeing their children settle in and reflect during these ninety-minute sessions. One parent did stop coming after four weeks because he was concerned that his three-year-old would misbehave, therefore the parent struggled with the environment.

Two months after this family experiment ended, we talked with the parents to hear their reflections about the experience. They suggested that it would have been helpful to provide more time to interact as family clusters while in the space. They also wanted time and a place to socialize each week after leaving the sacred space. We were very encouraged to hear that five of the six families had chosen to implement some of the elements of what they had experienced into the rhythm of their own family life. With that news we felt that our purpose had been accomplished. You will see this study referred to as the Good Shepherd Family Research.

What We Learned

What we discovered as we wove our research findings together was not a theory of childhood spirituality or even a definition of it, not a set of norms for what children should know or how they should think at a given age. Rather, the children gave us a glimpse of their spiritual potential, how they were at work putting together pieces of theological understandings, how they experienced God, and how their interactions with adults helped or hindered. Listening to the children also highlighted individual differences and how important it is to respect those differences, not expecting children, even in the same family, to respond or develop in the same ways or on a similar timetable.

Before moving on in the book, it is important to note that what we see in a child’s drawing or hear in a child’s comments is not the full picture of what he or she does