Monday, July 21, 2008

Kids in church - I love it but then

This Sunday there were almost as many kids in church as adults and it was fun to see. And most of them went to children's church during the sermon, except for two or three. One of those kids was this loud, squirmy, hyped up two-or-three year old boy. I think he was quiet for maybe ten minutes totally the whole sermon. In fact I have no idea what the sermon was about.

I thought I could ignore him. He started by being relatively loud at the other side of the church with his dad, which didn't work. We sit in a half circle. Then he ran across and sat with his mom who was sitting exactly in front of me. For about a minute he was quite and then he had questions and so was talking out loud. He's three, can he actually know when to be quiet? Is it alright to have kids be quiet at that age? And what age would be. Does it go against a child's nature?

Anyway. I started to realize that for all my love of kids in church it was almost not worth it to go because the kid so entirely distracted me that I don't remember much of the sermon at all. I think it's important to not expect kids to act like adults who can sit still for 20 or 30 minutes. But what do you do? Arg.

2 comments:

Zuzu said...

the problem wasn't the kid... while i think americans are fairly intolerant of children as well as elderly people, generally speaking, sometimes the problem is parents who fail to meet that child's needs and take him outside and/or in another area to speak. the child's behavior was perfectly fine. i think there's something healthy about naming the distraction, the problem, as inconsiderate adults and not the child.

titration said...

zu - hmmm. I agree on the tolerance thing. I wondered about the parents. I know that if I was little with my parents they would have taken me straight out!