Children at Risk

Fuller Seminary’s School of Intercultural Studies in 2006 chose “Children and the Mission of God” as its theme for its annual missiological lectures. The lectures were launched by Bryant Myers, newly appointed professor of International Development, and a well known Christian development ideologue. He began the lectures with an overview presentation, “Children in our Midst: Our Mandate”. Among the thoughts brought out by Bryant Myers, was the insight that “The well-being of children is an indicator of the well-being of society,” According to him “If the children are doing all right, the rest of us probably are, too.”

One thrust of Myer’s speech was that even though many of the world’s children today are doing well, there are many who are not. An alarming 210 million children globally are involved in labor outside the home, half of them in full-time work—taking them out of school and placing many in hazardous conditions. Of these, 1.8 million are involved in the worst forms of child labor: prostitution and pornography. Myers noted the distressing fact that those who exploit children in this way often take advantage of disastrous situations; after the tsunami, he said, “the child exploiters arrived in Banda Aceh (Indonesia) as soon as relief workers did.”

Many more disturbing statistics were offered in the speech: 5.7 million children are engaged in forced or bonded labor; 300,000 are child soldiers; 10 million are refugees, many without their families; tens of millions live on the streets; and vast numbers are unregistered, with no recognition by their governments. Myers also noted the very different kind of problem of “deceived children” in the U.S., where $12 billion is spent every year on advertising directed to children 12 and under. In the affluent world as well as the developing world, children are at risk – albeit in different forms.

“Children are in trouble everywhere in the world—some in awful ways, but also in more sophisticated, psychological ways,” Myers said. We must “act like Christ and be the Church” by caring for and protecting children through tangible provisions of care, by actively advocating for them, and by empowering them. “These children need to hear the gospel,” Myers urged. “They need to learn the liberating news that Jesus weeps for them…and that he provides forgiveness.” We must all think more intentionally about children and how our daily decisions will affect them. The speech concluded with a moving note citing a quote from John Whitehead: “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.”

It is very apparent that in our world and for that matter in most of history, children have by tradition been cherished, if at all, as citizens of tomorrow, the so called “future generation”. With this positioning as “assets of the future”, children deal with marginalization on account of their gender, caste, race, ethnicity and class, just as grown-ups do; they suffer being inconsequential merely for the reason that they are “children”. That childhood itself is valued and requires to be treasured, sheltered and provided for, is a relatively modern insight.

Similarly, until very recently, issues related to children have tended to be marginal in almost every area of Christian living. From the many rules of the New Testament calling for compliance of children ‘in all things’ (Col.3:20) to all the culture and behavioral norms of the present day, a top down approach which often prevents listening to children and characterizes the child-parent association as one of blind obedience: it is more about power and control than nurture.

However as we know Jesus identifies himself with children in a series of verses in the gospels. (Mk.9:33-7; Mt.18:1-2; Lk.9:46-8) “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” (Mk.9:37) Jesus’ teaching about receiving children as the mark of true greatness places children at the center of the community’s attention as prime objects of its love and service, and requires of all who would be great in the community to serve children. Those simple words of Jesus say it all that there is to be said on the subject of children. If you want to know who God is, look in the face of this particular child. If you want to know who has the highest rank in the Kingdom of God, it is the one who cares for children

Christian workers involved in ministries to children at risk of course cannot fail to see the reality of the plight of the children in such a world. Jesus Christ came to not only redeem the nations but also to place people in a redemptive culture where they could have hope. Children are made in the representation of God and as such have an inherent spirituality. This recognition that children are spiritual beings and are spiritually aware guides Christian people working with children at risk in all that they do and plan in their ministry. But how does this appreciation of a child’s spirituality shape their work? How does one work with those children whom life has ‘incensed and who have a disturbed spirituality because of their experiences in their respective “at risk” situations?

In some ways, Jesus left us clueless. The Lord Jesus at no point told his followers how to be successful with children or what policies to put in place or what to speak to a child at risk; as an alternative he told them to just let the children get nearer to them and then be taught by them, look to them and discover the way they are, grow to be like them. Jesus’ main concerns are not about what one can do for children but what one can learn from them to shape our own life and spiritual growth.

Coming to some hard realities on the ground, one of the certainties of our world at the start of the twenty-first century is the rapid pace of change. Even though the world is going through a moment of unparalleled growth, capital and the enlargement of the resources of the "have" nations, there are still many pieces of our world where scarcity, sickness, bloodshed and conflict are taking their effect on the social order. The depressing truth is that this unmatched lucrative development in the world order has left the developing world far away in the past to the point that the disparity between the "haves" and "have-nots" has intensified considerably in the last several decades

In India 87 of every 100 children born have the probability of dying between birth and exactly five years of age. The state of India's newborns and the health challenge faced by them is bigger than that experienced by any other country. Although India's neo-natal mortality rate (NMR) witnessed a significant decline in the 1980s (from 69 per 1,000 live births in 1980 to 53 per 1,000 live births in 1990), it has remained static since then (only dropping four points from 48 to 44 per 1,000 live births between 1995 and 2000),

Also, one in every three malnourished children in the world lives in India. Child malnutrition is generally caused by a combination of inadequate or inappropriate food intake, gastrointestinal parasites and other childhood diseases, and improper care during illness, the report says, while pointing out the incongruity that in a nation with soaring Gross Domestic Product rates and Sensex indices, children continued to die of malnutrition and starvation. The major cause for such a tragedy is the lack of public health services in remote regions, poor access to subsidized health care facilities, the declining state expenditure on public health and the lack of awareness on preventive child health care.

Similarly globally, each day some thirty thousand children under the age of five will die around the world. In the time that we will take to read this paper, some 1,200 children will have died. The causes are many: war, poverty, hunger, preventable diseases. And yet, even though we lose as many children in a week as were killed in the 2004 Asian Tsunami, rarely does a cry go out or the plight of these children get reported in the news. Children remain the hidden casualties of war and poverty in the world, unseen in the reporting on bombs and political responses. In Somalia alone, the site of the most recent fighting for power, some 1.5 million children are at risk in the middle of the battle. Worldwide, mostly on the African continent, there are over two million children under the age of 14 living with HIV/AIDS. And yet, we rarely hear about them. They remain invisible to us, and if we are honest, we often prefer it that way.

Besides as Keith White puts it, in the name of liberal democracy and freedom, children and young people have televisions, mobile phones and videos in their private space, ideal conditions for the global predators who would consume them as market statistics. Millions of child prostitutes have their identities, their virtue, their futures taken from them as an insatiable industry thrives on arousing the sexual desires of adults, an inevitable and unspoken effect of which is eventually to recreate children as sexual creatures. Child soldiers indoctrinated and motivated by adult communal and religious agendas kill and maim other children.

In view of such a hard to believe inventory of trouble for our children and the diverse manners in which we adults have put them at risk, what should be our response? What Should Christians do in a world that seems to be difficult and more dangerous for our children? Without a doubt we should do what Jesus did. Obviously, we should not do less. Jesus preached and healed, He taught and He acted. He modeled what He taught. However, the core of Jesus’ ethical impetus, however, is his specific summons to begin living now in this fallen world according to the values and demands of the coming kingdom. Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom does indeed lead to the formation of a disturbing community asking and trying to answer searching and difficult questions. But it is a group of people who lovingly challenge the evils of the here and now precisely because it shares the Creator’s love for his good creation and dares to strive now toward that fullness in personal, socioeconomic and political life that Christ will bring in its fullness at his second coming.

With all this background, we must all be familiar with the many issues to be taken up by the Church and those of the church who are engaged in this mission, not the least of which is to continually renew our grasp of the mission of God as it gets reinterpreted at different times without changing at its core. Part of the difficulty here is the range of impulses for mission among the many part of the global missionary movement. Among younger Christians in many places in the world, ideas such as the glory of God as revealed in the worship songs of their time, identification of the desires of the whole self in community, and a new found commitment to justice have aroused a new mission’s consciousness. An illustration of this is the increasing response to the overwhelming plight of over one billion children at risk. This concern has found expression at various levels including at the level of development practitioners as well as academicians.

Such an encouraging support and an over powering urge among Christians agencies, churches and individuals to network, to collaborate and to share leanings and experiences led to the formation of the Viva Network( Now Viva) around a decade ago. Viva today works with over 80 network initiatives helping as many as 1.2 million children, apart from being a catalyst for the furtherance and popularization of child theology in seminaries and Bible Colleges. Other Viva initiatives for the church include (Understanding God’s Heart for Children), for Child Care Workers (Celebrating Children) and for Christian institution and church run programs (Quality Improvement System).

There are newer and possibly greater challenges that wait for us on the horizon and the fight to take on and overcome these challenges is only beginning to be fought. Global trends like the growing influence of cyber evil, is only one more in a register that includes economic excess, aggressive flare-ups, and limitless immoderation. These engross people deeply excited for a sense of individual meaning and distinct value in today’s world. Our Christian answer to these things must come out from three strong commitments:

We must be acquainted with the influence of historical and currently emerging societal and global trends as the setting in which Christ’s redemptive love is discovered. We must pull out all paradigms, programs, and individuals whose significance no longer correlate to the world’s changing life contexts. And, finally, we must return to the Lord in complete humility, equipped with knowledge of the signs of the times but in patience awaiting the wisdom from above that will give us light and insight for the work ahead.

In addition to all that they do in terms of physical interventions Christian workers involved with children at risk have an opportunity as well as a responsibility to help children explore their own spirituality and provide to them the necessary ingredients of spiritual formation and also be enriched by what the children have to offer. Along the way then, they can help over turn existing paradigms that see children as passive recipients of assistance and who have nothing to offer to the church and to society. That is most certainly not true. A Christian response to children at risk needs to grasp the opportunities to allow children to explore, ask questions and find the answers that helps them acknowledge the sin in a fallen world that has put them at risk and find healing in their lives, lest when they grow up to be adults, they in turn perpetuate a vicious cycle where they in turn pose a risk to future generations of children.

Finally then, as we have seen, children are not the people of tomorrow, but are people of today. They have a right to be taken seriously and to be treated with consideration and respect. They should be provided opportunities to grow up into whoever they were intended to be, for the unidentified human being inside each one of them is our hope for the future.’ Jesus as we know was entirely unyielding in taxing adults and adult systems that damaged or wounded little ones: the adults needed to alter their norms radically, even to the extent of tugging out their own eyes and cutting off limbs if this would put a stop to them from harming children (Matthew 18).

Christian Choices : How Different Are They ?

Forty-eight students from an elite Christian school in Delhi who recently failed in one or more exams in the Class XI finals were recently asked to leave the school and seek admission else where in the middle of the academic year. The decision created enough fear and panic among the parents for the news to make it to the pages of at least one prominent news paper. Such a piece of news and comments in the press provides an opportunity to introspect on the long journey that Christian institutions have made in India to arrive at this juncture.

The early history of the Christian institutions in India is tied up with the so called civilizing mission of both the East India Company and subsequently, the church. Eventually as the colonial regime stabilized and thinking evolved, this mission got subsumed into the church turning into the quasi official social sector arm of the state developing services – primarily education and health care to areas where the State did not or would not go. To aid this process, church related institutions were often given land on perpetual leases at nominal rates – a privilege which makes church a large owner of property even today cutting across denominations.

Although a large emphasis of Christian institutions today purports to be the poor, this was not always the case. The typical Church run institution catered to the elite of the day, an image that has persisted to this day. “Civilizing” the ruling classes was always a primary agenda of the state and the church apparatus was not the only the instrument available to pursue this goal.

The Mayo Colleges and the Lawrence Schools were set up with a similar purpose. Contrary to popular perception although exposure to Christian values and truths was a part of the church curriculum, proselytizing was not a major piece on the agenda. This was partly the result of experience – a short period in the early nineteenth century when missionaries were indeed active produced a kind of native Christian that were so alienated from their own community that most were too worthless to be even used as pawns- some from the aristocracy turned to drink and debauchery and others had to be accommodated in artificial townships called “mission compounds”

But Church run institutions were and are known for promoting excellence. Part of the “civilizing mission” was about taking “barbarians” and turning them into “gentlemen” and “ladies”. Although the italicized terms have now become archaic and now evoke nothing but revulsion and images of arrogant imperialists, there was a certain beauty in picking up some thing raw and then molding them into products of merit. It also blended well with the teaching of the church and Jesus Christ who chose people to be his disciples such people “not many of whom were wise according to worldly standards”, “God chose what is weak in the world” and “God chose what is low and despised in the world”

Look at Jesus’ 12 disciples—mostly poor and despised people: fishermen and tax-collectors. An interesting thing is that God usually calls the poor, lowly, and despised to do His great work. Look at Jesus’ 12 disciples—mostly poor and despised people: fishermen and tax-collectors. The only one who had a very high education and prestigious occupation was the Apostle Paul. But Paul himself noted that it is not the high and mighty that are called.

The world thinks that we need to go after the gifted people, the talented people, the wealthy people, and the important people. If we plan to really accomplish great things, then we need the powerful people, the educated people, and the respected and influential people. This is the way we think, and it is very logical in terms of how things work in this world.

Hidden behind the curtains, we Christians think that way too. Most often we think that God could do great things with people who have something special to offer him. We think that God could do greater things through them than he can do through "ordinary" people, who do not have the fame or money or recognition. ".While this may be the thinking of the world and even the thinking of many Christians, it is not the thinking of God. In fact, the wisdom of God is entirely the opposite of the wisdom of the world. The wisdom of the world is centered on what people can do. It is humanistic at its core. In other words, it only considers what can be done through our human resources. And it even looks at spiritual enterprises, like the church, in human terms. The church is seen much like a business, and decisions are made according to the acceptable business practices of the culture without necessarily factoring in any of the spiritual resources that God indicates we have in Christ. We even live our lives based on the wisdom of the world.

But does God really need those who are impressive in terms of the respect and adoration of the world? Are they necessary for God to accomplish great and mighty things? Does God pick the best, the most talented, the most influential, the most wealthy, the beautiful people, because he desperately needs their gifts, talents, connections, prestige and power ? There is a simple answer to this. It is NO!!!

So let us not measure a person by his profession or occupation or academic achievements alone though these things certainly have their value and importance and by no means do we demean them in any way. . I guess that the bright students whom the bright and elitist schools would like to retain are capable of doing pretty well on their own and the school’s assistance might only make them do better. But the ones who are failing, falling behind and unable to cope are the ones who might have crossed over the line had the school chosen not just to keep them on their rolls but pay extra attention to them to help them cross the threshold , they might have had another, better life. The wonderful truth is that God uses ordinary people just like you and me. In fact, he delights to use ordinary people like you and me. God is able to take us and do great and mighty things through us because it does not depend upon us; it depends upon him. That is the great Christian witness to the world and once that has been discarded, there is not much to choose between a so called Christian school and any other

Christian Institutions : Slowly Losing their Way

Forty-eight students from Delhi’s St Columba’s School at Ashok Place — who recently failed in one or more exams in the Class XI finals — have been asked to seek admission elsewhere. Such a piece of provides an opportunity to introspect on the long journey that Christian institutions have made in India to arrive at this juncture.

The early history of the Christian institutions in India is tied up with the so called civilizing mission of both the East India Company and subsequently, the church. Eventually as the colonial regime stabilized and thinking evolved, this mission got subsumed into the church turning into the quasi official social sector arm of the state developing services – primarily education and health care to areas where the State did not or would not go. To aid this process, church related institutions were often given land on perpetual leases at nominal rates – a privilege which makes church a large owner of property even today cutting across denominations.

Although a large emphasis of Christian institutions today purports to be the poor, this was not always the case. The typical Church run institution catered to the elite of the day, an image that has persisted to this day. “Civilizing” the ruling classes was always a primary agenda of the state and the church apparatus was not the only the instrument available to pursue this goal.

The Mayo Colleges and the Lawrence Schools were set up with a similar purpose. Contrary to popular perception although exposure to Christian values and truths was a part of the church curriculum, proselytizing was not a major piece on the agenda. This was partly the result of experience – a short period in the early nineteenth century when missionaries were indeed active produced a kind of native Christian that were so alienated from their own community that most were too worthless to be even used as pawns- some from the aristocracy turned to drink and debauchery and others had to be accommodated in artificial townships called “mission compounds”

But Church run institutions were and are known for promoting excellence. Part of the “civilizing mission” was about taking “barbarians” and turning them into “gentlemen” and “ladies”. Although the italicized terms have now become archaic and now evoke nothing but revulsion and images of arrogant imperialists, there was a certain beauty in picking up some thing raw and then molding them into products of merit. It also blended well with the teaching of the church and Jesus Christ who chose people to be his disciples such people “not many of whom were wise according to worldly standards”, “God chose what is weak in the world” and “God chose what is low and despised in the world”

By doing what it has done, by turning out on to the streets, those who have failed , the very same people whom the world calls low and despised , St. Columbus School has turned the teaching of Jesus on it head. By choosing students who are already bright and intelligent to remain on the school roles and turning out the rest to the mercy of those mediocre schools which might accept them, it has gone the way of any other commercially run school which does not purport to run on the basis of any noble values. After all, again to quote Jesus Christ and the Bible , “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick. I guess that the bright students whom St. Columbus are capable of doing pretty well on their own and the school’s assistance might make them do better. But the ones who are failing, falling behind and unable to cope are the ones who might have crossed over the line had the school chosen not just to keep them on their roles, they might have had another, better life

This piece cannot really close without referring to Anna Hazare and his school in Ralegaon Siddhi who has a school that takes only the sort of students that St. Columbus chooses to discard and who has built up the reputation of his school by enrolling almost entirely rural village youth, delinquents with police records and those who have failed repeatedly in their previous schools. By picking up those whom even the world and even the church run schools has discarded, Anna Hazare is doing what Jesus would have approved of. In today’s world, we need to applaud people like him all the more for we need them more than a church that has lost its way.