In the spring of 2015, I took my then three and a half year -old son to a small church near our home in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. The pews were sparsely populated by an aging congregation, as so many are these days. There were no other children; no Sunday school; no children’s message. Prepared for this, I had packed an arsenal toy cars, goldfish, crayons, more goldfish, and, for emergency use only, my iPhone.
Henry fidgeted; he asked questions; he rustled the bulletin; he dropped his metal cars on the wooden pews and the sound reverberated through the empty sanctuary. This was in the first five minutes. Beads of sweat formed on my brow. I shushed. I pleaded. Please sit still. Please be quiet. My three year old did the best a three year old can do under those circumstances. I did not. I was so worried about disturbing the worship of the adults around us that I paid no attention to what was taking place in front of me.
It came time for the congregation to recite a unison prayer, and I stood up, bulletin in hand. Henry climbed on the pew, standing next to me, and as the congregation intoned the somber prayer, Henry opened his sweet mouth and belted out the theme song to Thomas the Tank Engine. I was mortified. I don’t remember the rest of the service.
It wasn’t until later that night that I had what I might now call an epiphany. When Henry stood up next to me and began to sing, he was not trying to disrupt the service. Henry had joined us in prayer. He can’t read; he doesn’t understand theology. But he understood that all the people around him were standing up and saying something together, and he joined in, in the best way he knew how. Through all the rustling and fidgeting and dropping things, Henry was paying closer attention to worship than me.
This is a new experience for me- having my kids in worship. I’m a pastor, and until recently, I entrusted my children to the Sunday School Superintendent and her coterie of lovely volunteers. My kids got some great religious education, learned some beautiful songs by heart that they still sing, and made friends.
What they didn’t get was a full worship experience with the entire community. They never saw or participated in communion. Didn’t sit at the base of the font for baptisms. They were sequestered, as it were, in other spaces, away from the sanctuary. I’ve heard it called ‘sacred babysitting.’
But since we’ve been worshiping together as a family this past year, their spiritual lives have erupted. It was the opposite of what I had expected. I expected that being out of a large and well-managed church school program, my kids’ interest in church would atrophy and fall away completely. I was, to be honest, desperately sad. But then Henry joined in the corporate prayers of the church with his rendition of the Thomas theme song. And my six year old daughter began singing a song from our new church, unbidden.
They often remind my husband and me to say or sing grace at the table. They talk about Jesus. They ask questions about God. They still fidget and talk and drop crayons and toy cars. But if I can tolerate the disruption, the payback is extraordinary.
And then came the waffles…
Waffle Church began this past July, when Emily Scott, pastor of St. Lydia’s Dinner Church and CoWorking Space, asked if I might be willing to help her church create a Sunday morning, allages, worship service. St. Lydia’s is a progressive, GLBTQaffirming congregation where life is lived out, literally, around the table. Sharing a meal is a tradition from the earliest days of the church— one that is now revived each Sunday and Monday evening at Dinner Church, and now, once a month on Sunday mornings at Waffle Church.
Henry taught me a lot about the expansiveness of spiritual experience that fateful morning last spring, and so we’ve tried to incorporate those lessons into Waffle Church.
First of all, it’s a no shush service. Kids make noise. It’s a fact. Instead of shushing, we seek other, better ways to capture the attention of kids (adults, too). We do that with music; music that is taught, not read from a hymnal. We do that with dramatic tellings of Bible stories, and poems, and opportunities for discussion worked right into the liturgy. We do it also with art, by using our hands to respond to what we’ve heard and seen.
Inevitably, what most captures the attention of children is communion. So curious are they to watch me lift that giant loaf of bread in the air that they actually push their bellies against the table, pinning me in between the table and that storefront window. That’s the beginning of our sacred meal. It ends around three oval tables, over steaming waffles and cinnamon butter and maple syrup. It’s raucous and sticky and fun and holy… so holy.
Children LOVE Waffle Church, but it is NOT children’s church. It’s not even a church service meant only for families. We may not all have children, but we have all BEEN children. At some point, we’ve all been shushed, or told to sit down, or left out of the holy mystery of someone else’s deciding. Not here. We believe that there are as many ways to experience the holy as there are people to experience it. And kids… well, they’ve got an angle we ought to pay attention to, with their generative imaginations and fearless questioning. As one writer has said, “God and the child get along well together.” Or, as the Transformer Rescue Bot said to his Rescue Bot buddy on a cartoon I watched with my four yearold son recently, ‘the young of their species make the best advocates.’
Our next Waffle Church is THIS Sunday, December 20th. Coffee’s hot at 10:30am. Worship begins at 11am. We will be telling and singing the Christmas story, and drinking hot chocolate with our waffles. The address is 304 Bond Street. All are welcome.
Sarah McCaslin is a pastor and psychotherapist living in Brooklyn with her husband and two children, whom she is known to call ‘my short theologians.’ You can find more of her ramblings at sarahmccaslin.com.