Saturday, March 22, 1997

Churches beginning to accept children's clamor

By LARRY LEE

Scripps Howard News Service

You've been there. You're listening to the minister's message, enjoying a spiritual moment with your God, when suddenly the devil awakens in the overgrown newborn two pews back.

You wait for Mom or Dad to haul the 20-pound temper tantrum out the front door for a two-minute time out, but somehow they don't seem to be fazed by this outbreak of holy terror.

Screaming, sneezing and coughing fits happen, especially in church. What's a pastor to do?

Times have changed, says the Rev. Will Cotton, senior pastor at Trinity-First United Methodist Church in El Paso.

While some people still want an absolutely quiet service with no distractions, Cotton says, "I remind them that the only absolutely quiet place is the cemetery."

These days more people - Cotton included - realize that children's noise is an acceptable part of worship.

"There was a time in church when it was too quiet, meaning there were no children and there were no youth," Cotton says. But the baby boomers and the baby busters are returning to church, and they're bringing their kids with them.

First-Trinity United Methodist has a special children's sermon, for which kids from the congregation are invited to come to the front of the church to do something special.

"By having that, we're inviting the kids to share," says Cotton. "Sometimes there's question-and-answer time, and there's laughter and honest answers from the children, and we welcome it."

At the Unitarian Universalist Community of El Paso, people who make a noise that's more distracting than joyful normally know when to head out to the patio, says Dr. Robert Crane, the church's publicity chairman.

"They tend to leave ... if it doesn't take many people looking at them," he says. "People are very considerate."

The church is interdenominational - "You find your own belief" - and is between ministers now, so the services with the guest pastors tend to be much more informal than usual, Crane says.

At the 10 a.m. Sunday Mass at El Paso's Our Lady of the Light Church, the Rev. Jose Guerrero relies on a sense of humor to assuage the embarrassment of moms with suddenly vocal babies and toddlers.

Guerrero says he tells "some kind of nice joke" so that others will not think bad of the child.

Rabbi Stephen Leon, of Congregation B'nai Zion, agrees. He says he would never stop a service to shush someone.

"In Judaism, the worst thing you can do is embarrass someone in public," he says. He added that B'nai Zion has a baby-sitting service during the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and during Hanukkah, times when the crowd swells to more than 1,000 people.

Guerrero's church has a cry room near the entrance with glass and a sound system so that people with crying babies can enjoy at least a part of the service. So does Highland Presbyterian Church, but the Rev. Dr. Rebecca B. Whitaker says parishioners there now call the room a "new parents" room.

"We never say you have to go there. It's always at the bottom of the bulletin," she says. "If the baby's fussin', I can always preach louder."

She says that older children, especially those from "unchurched families" (their parents don't attend church), sometimes become a bit rambunctious. The church has designated a few people who are good with children to sit with the rowdy ones, she says, and that simple presence seems to work,

And when older people launch into a coughing spell, a deacon takes them a glass of water.

"We believe that God is with us when we worship," Whitaker says, "but we don't believe that that means it's such a sacred place that we can't be human."

Cotton says that when he became a pastor a dozen years ago, he was pickier about noise out of worry that people wouldn't hear the sermon he had struggled to prepare.

Now, he says, he realizes that it's the event that people remember more than any one person's words, and he hopes the congregation will capture the overall joy and love of the service.

"So if they catch that, they'll catch the words they need to catch from me, too."

Whitaker agrees with Cotton that children are gladly being welcomed back to church.

"Actually the sound of a baby crying means that there's a new life in your church," she says. "Why would you want to run it off?"

(Larry Lee is a staff writer at The Herald-Post in El Paso, Texas.)