Once upon a time, there was no such thing as children’s church. There was just church. The offspring were expected to simply sit bolt upright and pay attention. The youngest ones might have had a box of Crayolas® (the little box, not the fancy 64-piece set with burnt umber and a crayon sharpener) so they could color on the bulletins. A boy might sneak a Hot Wheels® in his pocket to race over his knees, as long as he didn’t try to make a bbbbbbbb sound during the sermon. A doll and a brush kept the little girls occupied, I guess. I wasn’t paying attention to them yet at that point.
But by school age, God expected you to behave. Be-have. Don’t swing your legs, and don’t rock the pew. If the message didn’t keep your attention, there was a Bible, a hymnal, and a bulletin.
Once the sweet smell of the mimeograph had worn off the bulletin, its only good was to find out what hymn you were on, and the song leader announced that anyway. The King James Bible was pretty much ubiquitous, and once you learned your Thees and Thous you could start to page through and find out about Ehud and Eglon or sneak a peek at the Song of Songs. For some reason, I gravitated to the hymnal, so I spent my time trying to figure out what a HYFRYDOL and a CWM RHONDDA were. But as long as you kept still and paid a little attention, you were on safe ground.
An acquaintance of mine related to me about a Sunday when he and his sister were sitting in the pew. They were near the front, because both parents were in the choir, and so the only means of parental communication was a hard stare. Well, this young man had a fingernail clipper in his pocket. After fidgeting with it for a while, he decided to take it out of his pocket and clip a smallish chunk out his sister’s arm. She yelped a yelp the likes of which had never been yelped. The boy’s father stood up in the choir loft, excused himself through the row of basses, marched down off the platform mid-sermon, and grabbed his son by the ear. As he was perp-walked down the center aisle, my friend watched the faces of the parishioners nodding with the satisfaction that there was some admirable parenting about to happen. And boy, did it happen.
The occasional bad example kept most of us on the straight and narrow. But once the big hand and the little hand both swept past twelve, the primary difficulty was keeping our stomachs quiet. The Lord said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness,” but He didn’t say anything about what to do if we were hungering and thirsting while the righteousness was still going on. It was all I could do not to think about the pot roast that waited at home, so I could be first one out of the Buick to open the door and smell the glorious aroma.
After the final “Amen,” we folded our bulletins into paper airplanes and sailed them out of the foyer as we waited for our parents to finish shaking the pastor’s hand and talk about whatever the adults talked about. Every wiggle and whoop that was held in during the service got let out on the church lawn. Our parents settled us down enough to stuff us into the Buick and go home.
Simpler times. It’s all turned around now, upside-down. But I suppose that’s a story for another day.
I'm told that as a small toddler my attention was kept by a baggie of puffed rice. I'd stick my hand in and grab some, and shove my whole hand in my mouth. Then, retrieving more puffed rice with a slobbery hand was easy... and quiet too. Mom was pretty smart.
Some of my oldest and fondest church memories were of falling asleep with my head on my Mom’s lap during Sunday night service, tracing in her Bible’s maps section the wanderings of the Children of Israel in the Wilderness, and later, practicing my music sight-reading in service by singing a different SATB part on each of the four verses of the hymn. None of that was particularly spiritual but it provided a heritage in me which survives to this day.