By Mark Wingfield
Some people talk incessantly about their children; others never mention their children. I’m increasingly interested in the latter group.
Particularly when the silence concerns older teenagers or young adults, it’s a clue that something is amiss. Or that the parents believe there is something about their children that others would not approve.
Within churches, parents of prodigal children or even non-conforming children seem to go silent as a defense mechanism. Not just because they actually have faced judgment over the paths their children have taken, but sometimes because they assume their families no longer measure up to what is expected in church culture.
Here’s a news flash from a pastor: You are not alone. There are more parents in churches who don’t talk about their children than you would imagine. And as a result, there are more parents suffering in silence than you would imagine.
“Suffering” may be too strong a word here for some. Yes, some parents come to church laboring under the burden of not wanting to talk about their children who are addicted to drugs, making destructive life choices or facing an onset of mental illness. Others don’t talk about their children simply out of embarrassment: because the son has moved in with his girlfriend, the daughter has dropped out of college, the son is working at Target while all his peers are off at college, the daughter has announced to family that she identifies as a lesbian and the family doesn’t know what to do with that information.
Sadly, all the emphasis on “family values” in the 1980s and ’90s may have turned the church into a zone of silence for those who fear their families can’t measure up. It is possible that we’ve strived so hard to create saints that we’ve turned away all the acknowledged sinners.
On a recent Sunday morning, I had opportunity to visit with a mother in our congregation who has two young adult children, neither of whom are still active in the church despite being raised there. One of those children has made a series of disastrous life choices that few people know about. But as we chatted before church, I asked this congregant about both her children — not just to make polite, or even impolite, conversation, but because I genuinely wanted to know about them. She gave me a straightforward update, which I was glad to receive.
And later in the service, when we exchanged the peace of Christ after communion, this same mother embraced me and said, “Thank you for always asking about my children.”
In that moment, an epiphany dawned. Maybe I, maybe we, need to give silent parents opportunities to talk about their children. Maybe there is healing when parents hear a friend or pastor genuinely ask about children they know to be estranged from the church or from others. Maybe instead of waiting for the parents to say the first words, we need to extend an opening for open conversation.
In doing so, perhaps we signal that what we say we believe actually is true even inside the holy halls of the church: that nothing can separate us from the love of God.