h.

Sec. 3. A PLACE FOR ALL IN THE CHURCH

The family may help directly toward the realization of this ideal by an
insistence on the family conception and the family program in the
church. Bring the children with you to the church and seek to find there
a place for each as natural as the place he occupies in the home. If the
church makes no such provision, if it has no place for children, in the
name of our wider spiritual family relationships we must demand it. Let
the voice of the family be heard insisting on suitable buildings and
specially designed worship for child-life--suitable forms of service and
activity. Let the thought that goes to furnish these in the home be
carried over to provide them in the church.

Parents may help their children to find right relations with the church
by their attitude toward it as the larger family group. To think and act
toward this institution as our home, the wider home of the families, is
to establish similar habits of thought in children. Such a concept is
not always easy to maintain; the church includes many of different
habits of thought from ourselves, divergent tastes and habits of general
life. Here one must exercise the family principle of responsibility
toward the weaker and immature. This family, the church, just like our
own family, exists, not to minister to our tastes, but that we may all
minister to others.

The principal service which the family may render to the church is,
then, to foster an interpretation and view of the latter which will
relate it more closely to the home and will make it evidently natural
for child-life to move out into this wider social organization for
religious culture and service. Surely this should be the attitude toward
membership in the church, whether that membership begins theoretically
in infancy or in maturer years; the child is trained to see the church
as his normal society, the group into which he naturally moves and in
which he finds his opportunity for fellowship and service. The family
may well hold that relationship steadily before its members. In
childhood the child is in the church in the fellowship of those who
learn. The Sunday school is the spiritual family in groups discovering
the way of the religious life and the art of its service. The fellowship
grows closer and the sense of unity deepens as the child's relationship
passes over from the passive to the active, from the involuntary to the
voluntary--just as it doe