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).