Jesus and the children

People were also bringing babies to Jesus for him to place his hands on them. When the disciples saw this, they rebuked them. But Jesus called the children to him and said, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these”. Luke 18:15-16

It used to vaguely bother me when evangelists stressed the importance of winning converts while they were still young.

I was in a meeting once when the speaker asked us to raise our hands in groups according to what age we were when we came to faith in Christ. I can’t now remember the numbers with any precision, but it was something like this… Below ten? – just a smattering. Ten to sixteen? – quite a forest of hands went up (including mine). Sixteen to twenty-one? – again, a significant number. After that? – just ones and twos.

So what was it that troubled me? Well, that break-down might seem to imply that Christianity is a faith for the immature or gullible. Not, of course, that the speaker intended such a suggestion – he was, after all, himself a Christian evangelist! - but it could be taken that way by people opposed to “religion” in general, and Christianity in particular: Oh, it’s a need you grow out of as you develop into adulthood, like believing in Father Christmas. Clever, sophisticated, experienced people don’t get taken in by all that religious stuff! The message seemed to be “Grab ‘em young, or the chances are you won’t grab ‘em at all”.

On the face of it there is some truth in such statistics. The majority of new converts do indeed seem to be younger people: as I look back over my 40-plus years of ministry, what I might call “elderly converts” are few and far between (though I do particularly remember with a smile the baptism of a couple of sprightly, jolly, 80-plus ladies).

The answer to that feeling of being “vaguely bothered” is, of course, the story of Jesus welcoming the children and rebuking the disapproving disciples. It’s a story important enough to appear in each of Matthew, Mark and Luke. But Luke has a tiny detail the others don’t have. In Matthew and Mark we are told that unspecified people (presumably the parents) were bringing their children to Jesus. But Luke goes out of his way to tell us that Jesus himself “called the children to him": in other words, he didn’t just allow them to be brought, he actively invited them himself.

And then follow those beautiful - and very challenging - words: “… the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it” (Luke 18:15-17).

Jesus didn’t focus on children only because of their innocence and receptiveness, but because they model the attitude with which we all need to come to God, whether we are nine or ninety. Remember that prayer he once prayed: “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children” (Matthew 11:25).

Remember too his rebuke of other adults disapproving of noisy children (they were joining in the traditional Jewish shout, “Hosanna to the Son of David”): “Yes,” says Jesus, “but have you never read, ‘from the lips of children and infants you, Lord, have called forth your praise’” (Matthew 21:14-16).

How beautiful such passages are! Children aren’t receptive to Jesus mainly because they are naïve and gullible, but because they bring with them into this world an instinctive openness to spiritual realities and other precious things you can’t measure. Putting it another way: they haven’t yet learned to be jaded, cynical and twisted – something that so easily happens to us as we grow.

In other words: the responsible Christian evangelist (parent, teacher, preacher) working with children is not exploiting their naivety; he or she is feeding and nurturing a natural appetite that the “adult” world, tragically, has lost sight of. They need our prayers, our support and our respect – especially given that the openness of children leaves them vulnerable also, of course, to false ideas.

As I said, my hand went up in the 11-16 category. I sometimes wonder how things might have turned out for me if my undramatic little conversion had not happened when I was a spotty 15-year old. Perhaps I would have embarked on a life of crime and become enormously rich!… or discovered a talent for music and had a career to match Beethoven or the Beatles!… or developed my stellar sporting ability and ended up opening the batting for England!...

Or perhaps not. Just slipped into a typical conventional life, more likely.

True, it might have been exciting to have a spectacular conversion experience in, say, my fifties. But how much then to unlearn! How much damage to clear up! How much time to reclaim!

No - there’s a lot to be said for a life as a run-of-the-mill Baptist minister! No regrets; oh, no regrets! Thank you, Lord, for calling me young!

Thank you, Father, for the wonderful gift of children. And thank you for those adults who are specially gifted in teaching and nurturing them in Christ. Especially when it seems a hard and thankless task, please reassure them that their work is not in vain. Amen.