It can help us all, and enhance our conversation with each other, if we are willing to identify and reflect on the hidden grammatical structure of meaning behind our use of the words theology and children, on their own and together, and how this structure developed in our own lives. I travelled my own journey with these two concepts as well as with real children and my own way of doing theology, accompanied by other people, who together informed the development of my grammar for relating children to theology. It is actually still a grammar-in-the-making.
The starting point for my own learning of this grammar was not my formal theological studies. It already started way back, at my birth and in the way I was welcomed into this world. It may even be argued that it started with my conception when I was created from the sperm and egg of two people with their own grammar of children and theology embedded in their lives. The grammar of these two people did not influence me only by nature but also through nurture. I firmly believe that a large part of the foundation of my grammar about children and
theology was already laid in my sub-conscious in my early childhood years through the context in which I was nurtured. Since I was a baby, my parents had two or three babies in foster care for shorter or longer periods for many years. Over many vacations, we took care of an orphaned child. Although I grew up as the only biological child of my parents, I was surrounded by children of whom my parents took great care. These experiences influenced my hidden grammar in connection with children in many ways, often without being consciously aware of it.
I was also surrounded by theology in many ways. My parents were dedicated Christians, very much involved in church life. They attended church services regularly and took me with them from a very tender age.
For many years, my father served as a deacon and later as an elder. Since I can remember, my mother has been involved with the children’s and woman’s movements of our church. My father was a Sunday-school teacher for many years. I even had the privilege to have my father as my Sunday-school teacher for two years. I can remember many a time that I found my parents kneeling beside their bed, praying. I could also experience how much they loved people and served them in many ways.
My father became my role model for being a Christian. That was the theological context in which I grew up.
In this context, children and theology became a part of the hidden structure of my grammar without any conscious choice on my side.
In some mysterious ways, these two words met each other and started to live together. This happened to the extent that, in the second local church where I served as a pastor, I was asked to take responsibility for the children’s ministry in the church. When I asked, ‘Why me and
not my co-pastor or anyone else in the church?’, the answer was that the members of the church could see a natural connection between children and me, and that I cared deeply for children. It surprised me because, up to that point, I did not take any conscious decision to focus on children in my ministry. Much later, in a conversation with my oldest child, a daughter, about what she remembered from her early years in the first congregation I served, she made a comment that I shall always remember. She said that what stood out for her in her first 7 years of her life was the enjoyable moments when I played with her on the carpet in the foyer of our house, how we rolled around, how she was riding horse on my back, how I tossed her up into the air and caught her again, how funny it was, how we laughed together, how we later on played with her dolls. She then added that when her brothers arrived, they became part of our playing moments and that she never felt that her brothers were more important than she.
At that stage of my life, I did not even know that Landreth (2002:16) had said that play is the language of children. What happened in both instances was that the grammatical structure of children and theology that was deeply curved into the hidden meaning my life came to the fore spontaneously. It became part of my life exactly in the way that I explained above that language and grammar and the meaning attached to them are acquired in our lives. When I use the words theology and children in the surface structure of my grammar, this whole history and much more are present underneath it as the hidden structure of my grammar. As I grew up, this hidden structure was also formed by many life experiences and cultural factors that influenced my life, not the
least the theological tradition in which I was trained. It is this whole history that will always influence the way I use these two words and the meaning I attach to them. It is like an iceberg in the sea. The biggest part of an iceberg lies under the water, hidden from what is seen on the surface.
This is precisely the case with my grammar of children and theology:
the biggest part of meaning lies under the surface structure, hidden from the eyes of the people around me. What is true of myself is also true of every other person who uses these two words. We can use theology and children on the surface, structured according to the existing grammatical rules to convey a certain surface meaning to other people, but under the surface lies the bigger grammatical structure of our real understanding of these words and the meaning we attach to them. Unless we admit it to ourselves, start to create a space which allows us honestly to communicate with each other about this different hidden grammatical structures and listen very carefully to each other in this process, it will be very difficult to understand each other and create shared meaning and common ground for this new emerging academic subfield in theology.
We need each other in creating guiding rules for this new grammar- in-the-making. The main reason is that my thinking and the expressions I use in my own way of combining theology and children are still very much blurred in many ways, and I need the community of believers to guide me and journey with me through the fog surrounding my own mind.
What I express in my own views on children and theology is, therefore, not prescriptive in any way but only descriptive. It is a search for more clarity in my own mind and life with God and children in this world. It is
also expressed as an invitation to all theologians to join this searching journey.
The challenge we all are invited to is to develop together a grammar for relating children and theology in an understandable way, not just for our conversations amongst ourselves, but also for witnessing to the world and for building a new social order around children as expression of the ‘small’ world of God’s kingdom. If our grammar about children and theology does not change our lives and serve the missional calling of the church, we are spending our time and energy on a lost cause.
Theology, per definition, ‘has no reason to exist other than critically accompany the missio Dei’ (Bosch 1991:494). The essence and the goal of combining children and theology with each other is always supposed to be missional, to be an instrument in God’s hands to let the ‘small world’ of God’s kingdom come into this world and our own lives more and more.
The journey to construct a meaningful theological grammar of relating children and theology already started and progressed with the different publications about children and theology over the last few years (cf. Chapter 1), the consultations by the Child Theology Movement and other local and global initiatives over the last about 15 years. Taking into account this short period of deliberately focussing on children and theology, we have to admit that we still have to do with a grammar-in-the-making. Therefore, a certain degree of elasticity – and not the rigidity of a ‘grammar-police’ – should prevail amongst us in our efforts to develop a more understandable grammar structure for using the concepts theology and children together.