Why My Kids Want to Go to Church

Last week was Choir Camp for the Boys & Girls Choir here at St. James's. The annual late-summer camp gives young choristers an opportunity to have fun together, as well as begin learning music and the choir director's expectations before the program years starts. Each day of choir camp consists of several hours of music practice as well as on-site crafts and games, and off-site trips to places like Winding Trails.

My two girls love choir camp. In fact, they love choir. And my son cannot wait to join the Junior Choir this fall. For my three kids, participating in the St. James's choir goes far beyond a musical experience (although it is that) and beyond a fun experience (although it is that too). Fundamentally, being in the church choir has been a community experience. They feel at home when they are at choir. They feel they can be themselves. They make friends outside of their neighborhood and school. They come home from rehearsals and services with funny stories about pranks pulled and off-the-cuff cartoons passed around in the choir loft. And they work really, really hard—in part because they want to sound good, but in part because they want to do so for their fellow choir members and especially for their choir director. In choir, my children are learning what it means not just to go to church, but what it is to be church for one another—what it means to be in a fellowship of people with a common faith, where standards are high and all are accepted, with a common goal of worshipping God with their best efforts and talents.

My children have participated their whole lives in various church programs, including the nursery, Sunday School, and outreach projects. But choir is the thing that (finally, after many years of hard Sunday mornings) made them want to come to church. Choir is the thing that led them to belong to St. James's not just in name, but in reality. This makes sense to me, because choir is where they have most powerfully experienced what it feels like to be part of a Christian community.

I have realized that community is what I most want my children to get from their church participation. Learning Bible stories and the creeds, figuring out exactly what they believe about God and Jesus, engaging in acts of love and charity for those less fortunate than they are—all of these are valuable. But for me, they are not the core of what it means to be part of a church. My children can do all those things elsewhere, on their own or with other people. And I'm not convinced that any of those things will, on their own, lead them to ultimately embrace Christianity and decide to live a life of faith (as I hope they will). Rather, I believe that the long-term potential of their faith will be most influenced by experiences of community—connecting with people whose paths they would otherwise not cross, engaging in work together for a common purpose, witnessing times when those who are struggling are held up by those who are strong, being the struggling ones or the strong ones at different times, continuing to belong to one another even in times of disagreement or trouble.

So when I send my children to Sunday School, I'm not that concerned with what they are learning. Instead, I hope that being taught by Ms. Tomlinson or Mr. Schott or Mrs. Hooper gives them a glimpse of the many ways one can be a minister of God's grace in the world. When they help fill Christmas stockings or Easter baskets for people living in shelters, I hope they understand that such work is not just about "good deeds" or giving ourselves a pat on the back. Instead, I hope they see that when we come together, we can do a lot more than we can alone, and also that small acts of love done by regular people are meaningful, even if we're not changing the world in one fell swoop. And when they go to choir camp, I don't really care that they are learning to name musical intervals and how to harmonize. Instead, I hope know that the choir has bound them more tightly than our Sunday-morning cajoling ever could to this community of St. James's. And I believe that in such experiences of community lies our best hope that one day, our children will claim the faith we have raised them in as their own.

Ellen Painter Dollar is a professional writer and member of St. James’s Episcopal Church. She blogs for St. James’s every Monday, offering reflections on current events, family life, and parish life.

Ellen Painter Dollar

Ellen Painter Dollar is the author of No Easy Choice: A Story of Disability, Parenthood, and Faith in an Age of Advanced Reproduction (Westminster John Knox, 2012). Her articles, blog posts, book chapters, and books have been published by the Christian Century, GeneWatch Magazine, the New York Times‘s Motherlode blog, OnFaith,Brain, Child Magazine, the Episcopal Cafe, Christianity Today, the Osteogenesis Imperfecta (OI) Foundation, Virtual Mentor (the American Medical Association’s online journal of ethics), and more. She blogs about faith, family, disability, and ethics at Patheos.