It's Sunday morning

...and I'm baking muffins for church. Strawberry banana crunchy muffins to be precise. Church is currently late enough in the morning for me to whip up some snacks for the kids before we go. Technically, we don't "do" Sunday school through the summer, but I'll probably take all the kids out for a snack towards the end of the service. We'll probably have 6 kids there, between age 18 months and 6 years. I would rather stay for the service and let my kids play in the cuddle room at the back if they don't want to sit, but I'm not sure if that will be possible with the other kids there. The combination of the 6 who will be there can get pretty loud pretty quickly.

This is one of the issues in our church - children, and what to do with them. I try to keep my kids well behaved and quiet enough in church. I'm also parenting solo on Sunday mornings, teaching Sunday school, and always outnumbered by my kids. Often, I need to make the judgment call "is what they are doing more disturbing than me stopping them?". My youngest likes to dance to the songs, in the aisle. All three of my kids are very comfortable in church, and have all tried to talk to daddy while he's working more than once. We're working on it. I have to say that church with my oldest is pretty much night and day from when he was 2 to 3.

The problem comes in when us younger moms, those of us with children under age 10, run into the people who make it clear that kids being kids isn't acceptable. To be clear, I don't let my kids run amok in church. Not at all. I do the best I can though, especially in a smaller building where there isn't anywhere to hids. Yes, they are louder in the hall after church, but they aren't terribly loud in church. There are some people in church who do come from the school of "children should be seen and not heard". These people were the exact people I ran up against a few weeks ago, when I had finally had enough. Enough of people trying to parent my children when I am *right there*. Enough of people shushing my kids - and making much more noise than the kids were in the process. Enough of the looks (and if you are a parent, you know what I'm talking about) and eye rolls.

So I said something. Loudly. Publicly. At a women's meeting. There was fallout. There were some tears. There was anger - on all sides. There were meetings to follow up and discuss (with snacks - we are Anglican after all). This was the issue I alluded to recently.

Which is really leading into new understanding. Understanding that our culture isn't what it was. That church is not attended out of duty anymore, but out of passion. That when we spend our time hurting those we worship with, we help push that passion out of them. When we don't make church a safe place for us all, we can't worship together, and grow. Grow in faith, understanding, in numbers. That when we work work work as a church, we can't spend time in worship and in ministry. That when we make children be seen and not heard, more often we end up with children who are neither heard nor seen in church - something that many of the people in our church can attest to, as their own children are not church attenders. That when we are so focused on fund raising that we miss out on bible study, fellowship and growth, we are essentially missing the point. We're a hurting church, who has suffered a lot of loss. Instead of holding each other up, we've done too much hurting each other in our own pain. We've been so focused on meeting budgets that we're too work driven, and not Christ-driven - to sound a bit too "church lingo"ish.

This is being rather well received in our church. Surprisingly so. We have a lot of changes to make, and it's going to take some time. This is not going to happen overnight, but we are recognizing that what we're doing isn't working, now or for the long term. That we won't continue to do anything but maintain unless we truly rethink what we are doing here.

I feel rather bold even typing all this out. Like I'm calling our church out. The thing is, this is very much part of the process. We need to recognize the shortcomings if we are going to work towards fixing them. We need to name the illness instead of just worrying about the symptoms. This is something that the hubby and I have been seeing since we arrived here, but it's taken over 3 years of investment and time for us to be able to fully clarify the issues and to identify them, and to be able to speak the truth of them. I think that for a small, rural church it is WAY too easy to get stuck in the mindset of "meet the budget, and do what we think church should be, because that's how we've always done it". Now we're praying that God can transform us, as a congregation, into the church he desires us to be. That we can be healed of all of our hurts (there have been far too many funerals in our congregation lately) and focus on finding our healing and joy in Him.

This could be an interesting journey.