Raising Children in the Faith

In the Orthodox Church there is no waiting room for children. An infant is baptized and chrismated in one service and, from that same day, receives Holy Communion — normally a little of the Precious Blood from the spoon — and continues to commune at every Liturgy. This is the ancient practice, and it rests on a conviction: children are not future Christians being prepared for later membership but present members of the Body of Christ now. When Jesus' disciples tried to keep the little ones away, He rebuked them — "Suffer little children... to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 19:14).

Around the baptism stand the godparents, who take real and lasting responsibility for the child's Christian upbringing, and the churching of mother and child marks the family's return to the community. From infancy the child also has a patron saint whose name he bears, honored each year on the name day (patron saints as a practice).

Because children are full members, they belong in church — not in a separate room until they are old enough to behave, but in the nave with everyone else. Orthodox worship assumes their presence — at the Liturgy, children are present and audible throughout. A crying baby is not a disruption of the real worship but part of it, and parishes are generally patient with the noise, the wandering, and the questions. Parents commonly carry a small child up to venerate an icon, light a candle together, or simply hold the child where the incense and the singing can be seen and smelled and heard.

This matters because children learn the faith first through the body and the senses, not through argument. Standing before the icons, kissing them, receiving the spoon, tasting the blessed bread at the end, watching their parents cross themselves and bow — all of this is catechesis that reaches deeper than instruction, and it forms the memory of worship years before a child can define a single doctrine. Practical guidance for the whole family is gathered under church etiquette.

The parish supplies Sunday church school, but the Church has always known that the decisive teaching happens at home (the home as little church). St. John Chrysostom compared parents to artists shaping a statue or a painting, given a soul to form for God — a work more important, he said, than any earthly career they might plan for the child. That forming is done less by rules than by shared practice: family prayers at the icon corner, grace at meals, keeping the fasts and feasts together, and reading the lives of the saints as the family's true adventure stories. St. Paul reminds Timothy that "from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures" (2 Timothy 3:15), a faith that had lived first in his mother and grandmother (2 Timothy 1:5). The old counsel holds: "Train up a child in the way he should go" (Proverbs 22:6) — and the surest way to train is for the child to watch the parents walking it.