Seven entities of the Episcopal Church have recently received a multimillion-dollar infusion of funding to help them better engage their youngest members in worship.
Five dioceses, a New York City parish, and Virginia Theological Seminary are among 91 organizations to receive $1.25 million each through the Lilly Endowment’s Nurturing Children Through Worship and Prayer Initiative. Grant recipients included the Episcopal dioceses of Indianapolis, Los Angeles, North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia; the Parish of Calvary-St. George’s in New York City; and VTS.
The Lilly grants are intended to foster the spiritual growth of children by helping Christian congregations “more fully and intentionally engage children in intergenerational corporate worship and prayer practices.”
For the Episcopal Church, which has the highest average member age among religious traditions in the United States and largely struggles to retain the children of its members after they leave home, the stakes are high.
“I believe there’s a future for our church,” said Bishop Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows of Indianapolis. “And if we are not framing all that we do with that in mind by trying to cultivate the spiritual lives of our youngest members, and to continue to draw on the wisdom of our elders, then we’re not doing, I think, what God would call us to do.”
The Rt. Rev. Jennifer Brooke-Davidson, Assistant Bishop of North Carolina and supervisor of the diocese’s grant implementation, said this work gets to the core of the church’s mission.
“During the last few meetings of the House of Bishops, it’s really emerged that the bishops as a whole feel like many of the struggles that we have today can really only be ameliorated by deeper formation at all levels,” said Brooke-Davidson. “Everything ultimately comes back to that. And finding a way to do that in small churches and rural churches and churches that can’t support age-graded Sunday school is key to our mission of bringing the good news of Christ to the world, now and in the future.”
The reality for many churches is there are fewer and fewer children in the pews. A mere 14 percent of Episcopalians reported to be the parents or guardians of children younger than 18, according to the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. That presents a challenge when offering meaningful formation opportunities, Brooke-Davidson said.
“The majority of Episcopal congregations desperately want to do more with kids, but you can’t have an age-graded Sunday school when you have six kids,” she said.
Still, there are opportunities for parishes to “work with what they have” by more intentionally bringing children into the worship service, she said. For some, that could mean inviting children to be acolytes. For others, it could mean equipping parents and other adults in the congregation to have conversations with children about what’s happening in the liturgy and the fundamentals of the faith.
“A lot of studies have shown that this is one of the key pieces of faith formation and retention for young people,” Brooke-Davidson said. “Churches are concerned because they’re not always retaining young people once they’ve left home or even when they’re teenagers, … but [studies show] that when children have relationships with other adults in the congregation, that include conversations about faith, their engagement in the later years of their lives goes way, way up.”
With the grant funding, the Diocese of North Carolina will hire a missioner for children’s and family ministry, offer mini-grants to support innovative ideas among parishes, deploy coaches to assess how children are involved in worship, and host learning opportunities for congregational leaders related to intergenerational worship and formation. The goal is to support congregational initiatives rather than diocesan-wide programming, Brooke-Davidson said.
The Diocese of Indianapolis will establish a new program, “Centering All Children In Worship,” to help youth engage in a diversity of music expressions, including Anglican choral, African-American spiritual, and Latin American traditions. Baskerville-Burrows envisions the diocese offering workshops with area music instructors to teach children “how to sing other forms of music effectively, without the sense of appropriation.”
“This is something I’m hoping to grow a bit, no matter what size our congregations are and how many children they might have, to learn the fuller, broader expression of our current Anglican traditions, which are really broad in this global church of ours,” Baskerville-Burrows said.
The diocese also plans to help congregations cater to different learning styles and abilities by offering individual educational plans — accommodations typically offered in public schools for students who receive special education services — to help neurodiverse children engage in worship and create calming spaces within their churches.
“Like many other dioceses, I’m sure have noticed, in our congregations there is a broader sort of neurodiversity than was diagnosed in the past,” Baskerville-Burrows said. “So, there are different needs, and we want to pay attention to those.”
The Diocese of Virginia will establish a training laboratory that will invite experimentation among dozens of participating congregations and ultimately produce a guidebook for other congregations.
“For far too long, the church has underinvested in building disciples of Jesus Christ, deeming the nursery and age-segregated Sunday School as sufficient formation for our children, resulting in multiple generations [and a declining number] of parishioners loosely practicing the faith,” Bishop E. Mark Stevenson said.
“The Diocese of Virginia is serious about faith formation, and I wholeheartedly believe this work must begin with children and their families. Just as Jesus Christ incarnate did many radical things, even turned the world upside down when he came to save the world, we too need to think creatively, collaboratively, and downright radically about how our diocese is equipping and training our 173 congregations to raise disciples. This grant is an incredible opportunity to help us do this work.”
Virginia Theological Seminary will use its $1.25 million grant for a research project that will draw on Anglican theological anthropology, liturgical theology, science, and the arts to enhance the experience of worship and prayer for children, according to the seminary. The five-year project, called “Roots & Wings — Intergenerational Formative Collaborative,” will “challenge the status quo” of adult-centric worship practices and explore how to make worship and prayer more inclusive of children, including those with disabilities.
VTS said it was approached by small congregations and diocesan leaders to do this work.
“The project is designed to transform the culture of worship and faith formation in Episcopal congregations by recognizing the inherent worth and giftedness of all children,” said Sarah Allred, project director of Roots & Wings, in a press release. “Roots & Wings will call our denomination to account for the gap between what we claim to believe about children and how we too often live as church.”
The Episcopal entities were among 91 organizations to receive grants through the Lilly Endowment funding round, which totaled $104 million. Recipients represent a broad spectrum of Christian traditions, including Catholic, mainline and evangelical Protestant, Orthodox, Anabaptist, and Pentecostal organizations.
The Lilly Endowment is based in Indianapolis and was founded by the Lilly family in 1937 with gifts of stock from Eli Lilly and Company. It had $62.2 billion in assets at the end of 2023. The foundation supports initiatives related to religion, community development, and education.
Last year, the endowment made grants to 33 organizations in an invitational round of the Nurturing Children initiative.
