BackstageThere is a family in my congregation with three small children, and those children cannot be made to be quiet, and I have come to regard them as one of the truest things in the building.
They sing loudly and mostly wrong. They come in a half-beat behind on the words they know and invent the ones they do not. The youngest claps on no recognizable beat and shouts the parts she likes twice. On any given Sunday at least one of them is being gently walked to the back by an exhausted parent whispering the oldest liturgy of young families everywhere — we do not shout in here, we use our inside voice, please, everyone can hear you. And every time I watch that little procession to the back, some part of me wants to stop it, because I am fairly sure the God we are all trying to worship is enjoying the loud one more than He is enjoying most of the rest of us.
I did not always think this. I used to think, as most of us are quietly trained to think, that praise has prerequisites. That there is a way to do it properly — in tune, on time, with understanding, with a certain composure — and that the children were a beloved but junior version of the real thing, tolerated in the room until they grew up enough to worship correctly. And then I read again, slowly, the day the children would not stop shouting in the temple, and it rearranged me.
It is the end of Yeshua's life. He has just come into the temple and overturned it — driven out the men who had turned the house of prayer into a marketplace, healed the blind and the lame who came to Him there. The place is charged, dangerous, watched by powerful men who have already decided to kill Him. And into that tense and holy air comes a sound that the important people find intolerable: children. Children, running through the temple courts, crying out praise to Him at the top of their lungs — Hosanna to the Son of David — the same shout the crowds had raised at the gate, now in the mouths of kids who probably only half understood what they were saying and shouted it anyway because the shouting was joy and the joy was real.
And the guardians of the place are indignant. The chief priests and the scribes — the men who knew the most, who had spent their lives mastering the correct forms of worship — hear the children and are offended, and they come to Yeshua and say, in effect, do You hear what these are saying? Will You not make them stop? Do You not see that this is disorder, that this is untrained, that this is not how it is done?
And here is the sentence I want to lay in your hands. Yeshua does not hush them. He turns to the most educated worshipers in the nation and asks them if they have never read the old line — that out of the mouths of infants and nursing children, God has prepared praise. Out of the mouths of the ones who cannot possibly be doing it right. Out of the loud, the untrained, the half-comprehending, the ones the experts wanted removed for the good order of the service — from exactly those mouths, God has been drawing the praise He wants all along. The children were not the interruption of the worship in that temple. In the middle of a room full of men who had reduced the house of God to commerce and composure, the children were the only ones getting it right.
Sit with why that is, because it is not sentimental and it is not just that children are cute. A small child praising has none of the machinery we have built up around our own worship. She is not monitoring how she sounds. She is not wondering whether the people around her are impressed, or judging whether the song is to her taste, or holding back until the feeling is sufficiently strong to justify the expression. She has no reputation to protect and no performance to deliver. When something moves her, it comes straight out — loud, unfiltered, unashamed, unedited by any sense that praise is supposed to look a certain way. And that unguarded directness, which we spend our whole adult lives losing, is not the crude early draft of worship. It is nearer the finished thing than most of what we do. The children are not on their way to real worship. We are on our way back to it, and they are already home.
This is why I have stopped wanting the loud child walked to the back. Not because order does not matter — a gathering needs some — but because I have watched what it teaches, over years, to hush the joy of the young in the name of doing it properly. The child learns, without anyone ever saying it, that God is a God who prefers quiet and correct, that the real worshipers are the composed ones in the good seats, and that the way you loved Him when you were four, out loud and off-key and with your whole body, was a phase to be outgrown. And so the child grows up, and joins the composed, and learns to worship with the volume down and the guard up, and spends the rest of her life vaguely missing a directness she cannot name and cannot get back — a directness she was, in fact, trained out of by well-meaning people in the name of reverence. We did not make her more reverent. We made her more self-conscious, and called it maturity.
I want to say something to the tired parents first, because I have been you, walking the shouting one to the back with the whole room looking. Hear me: that loud, unhoused praise you are apologizing for is not a distraction from the worship. It may be the least self-conscious offering in the entire room, and the God you brought your child to meet is not annoyed by it. He prepared it. He said so, in a temple, over the objections of the most religious men alive. You are not raising a future worshiper who has not arrived yet. You are, for a few short years, standing next to one of the purest worshipers you will ever know. Let her be loud a little longer than is comfortable. You will miss it when the self-consciousness finally lands, and it will land soon enough on its own without your help.
And to the rest of us, the composed ones, the ones who know how it is done: the children in the back are not the junior version of what we do. On our best days we are trying, with enormous effort and a great deal of unlearning, to get back to what they do without trying. So the next time the loud one shouts the chorus twice and claps on no particular beat, do not wince. Let it convict you a little. Somewhere under all your good technique and appropriate volume is a four-year-old who once loved Yahuah out loud with her whole body and was never once worried about whether she was doing it right.
He has not stopped preparing His praise from mouths like that. He is only waiting for the rest of us to stop being so embarrassed by it — and to remember that we used to sing that way too, before we learned to be quiet.
