Monday, January 11, 2010

Church of England to target toddlers in effort to revive itself

A Church of England document, leaked to the Guardian, reveals the Church’s plans to target young children and toddlers in an effort to revive itself in the face of what is being seen as a terminal decline.

The document is called Going for Growth, and will be presented to the General Synod in February.

It sets out plans to bring more children into the Church by providing breakfast clubs, homework and sports and mother and toddler groups clubs.

The document says it aims to make churches more “child-friendly” and to work towards every child — regardless of their faith — having a “life-enhancing encounter with the Christian faith and the person of Jesus Christ”.

The document says: “We need to reconsider how we engage with and express God’s love to this generation of children and young people, whoever and wherever they may be.”

This is on top of a legal duty to conduct a daily act of worship – according to the Guardian, the Church intends to “remind” any schools that have covertly dropped it.

The Church will provide propaganda material that can be used in this enforced worship slot. The document reveals that the Church also intends to target further education colleges with what it calls a “social, moral, spiritual and cultural curriculum”.

Child Praying

The Church also intends to hijack issues that children truly care about — such as the environment — in order to lead them into the church. This will be done through Contact centres, Sure Start projects, children's centres and extended schools provisions – all of which “hold potential for the church to engage with children, young people and families through activities, breakfast and homework clubs, parenting support and sports activities.”

In another move to get at reluctant children, the Archbishop of Canterbury announced plans for a major expansion of church schools. The Church of England already sponsors 27 academies — government-funded but independently run secondaries — and has eight more in the pipeline for 2010 and another 30 under discussion. Indeed, the Daily Telegraph reported that the CofE intends to increase the number of Church-sponsored academies from the current 28 to 50, providing places for nearly 60,000 pupils.

The paper reports: “Church leaders have seized on the academies programme to plug gaps in the provision of Anglican secondary schools across the country. Historically, the number of Church primaries has vastly outnumbered the number of secondaries, which stood at just 220 before Labour introduced the academy policy in 2000.

Twenty eight Church academies have opened so far across England. Six more are to open next September in Taunton, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Rochester, Poole and Halifax. There are also plans for academies in Stoke-on-Trent, Salisbury, Liverpool and Kent.

Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said: “It is quite clear that the Church of England intends to relentlessly harass children and young people into church because they won’t go there of their own volition. But I think this initiative, like so many other evangelical efforts, is doomed to failure. The Church just doesn’t seem to understand that its time is past. In the meantime, it has no business using public money and civic resources in this way to try to revive itself.”
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Disclaimer

No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to us or to the blogspot ‘Clerical Whispers’ for any or all of the articles placed here.

The placing of an article hereupon does not necessarily imply that we agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.

SIC: NSS