Is the 'no food or drinks in the sanctuary' policy harmful?

Our church had signs like this posted. I asked our trustees to remove them because young parents in our congregation felt singled out for giving snacks or sippy cups to their toddlers in the service to help them keep quiet.

The signs are gone. However, several of our older members voiced their concerns to me that our sanctuary will now become a cafeteria or coffee shop. I encouraged them to view the change as a way to be welcoming and understanding of our young families.

I kind of have two minds on this one. On one side, you want to be more welcoming than worried about the carpet and pews (although those can be very expensive and time-consuming to clean, since they can’t just be carried out), but the real reason many don’t allow food/drink in the sanctuary is that a service shouldn’t be seen as similar to a cafeteria or coffee shop, since we want to meet the Lord reverently.

Our sanctuary has such a sign, but it’s not strictly enforced — I’ve definitely seen people drinking from water bottles, and kids eating snacks. That actually hits me directly, as I tend to bring my spill-proof travel coffee mug to church with me, as our church coffee is, well, less than desirable. I don’t use it during the service, and they haven’t prevented me bringing it in. Most of the time I’m in the choir, and up there, we can have coffee or water, since there are no pews or carpets, and people do want to keep their throats hydrated when singing.

I’m not really sure what the dividing line should be. I agree with wanting to help parents with things to help keep their kids quiet, and as I said, I wouldn’t mind having a sip of coffee once in a while either, but at the same time I kind of feel that if I can’t wait until the end of the service for a sip or a bite of something, there are other bigger issues I need to deal with, and I like keeping the service serious rather than totally relaxed. Maybe the way our church handles it is pretty good — have the sign, but don’t try to directly tell people not to bring such items in. Or perhaps having a policy that such items should be limited to those for small children. Just thinking aloud here.

I am 55, and my parents never allowed toys, books, crayons, drinks, food in the auditorium with us. We were told to sit still and listen. Period. We have lost this in these latest generations. My parents were like, if you can sit still watching cartoons for 30 minutes than you can sit still listening to a sermon for 30 minutes. It was the same for our kids. We never, ever allowed any of these things in.

You can't fix every parent that walks through the door, you have to meet people with where they are at. I kind of laugh at these parents who want to do away with Children's church because they want to have family worship, yet there kids are rolling around on the floor, coloring, eating and doing all kinds of other things in the auditorium during the church service. At that point, all they did was bring Children's church into the worship service.

dgszweda wrote: I kind of laugh at these parents who want to do away with Children’s church because they want to have family worship, yet there kids are rolling around on the floor, coloring, eating and doing all kinds of other things in the auditorium during the church service. At that point, all they did was bring Children’s church into the worship service

My experience also. I do think there is some weight to the argument that just being present with the adults communicates that worship and church life are truly for them, and not just the grown ups. But the counterargument is that when their attention is on their own activities anyway, that is canceled out. They are present but not present. And we might just be training them to tune out during worship.

I’m biased toward how I grew up, of course. We had excellent children’s ministries and later youth ministries, and the transition into worshipping with the adults worked fine. I think the children’s church thing ended like maybe 4th grade or so? Maybe as high as 6th. Not higher. The advantage of that model is that when you join adult church, you are actually cognitively ready for it. You are not already in the habit of tuning out.

But that model was also never 100% separation either. In our churches, we had Sunday AM, Sunday PM, and Wednesday PM services. Children’s Church was only Sunday AM. In one church there was a youth thing on Wednesday I think, but in other there definitely was not. So there was still exposure to worship with the adults. Probably—memory is fuzzy on this—there was at least something for infants and toddlers elsewhere on Sunday PM, too.

A reality we have to accommodate today, though—accommodate because we probably can’t fix it—kids are a lot more overstimulated at an earlier age. Attention spans are shorter and the level of stimulation needed to gain attention in the first place is a higher threshold. And that trend has occurred over decades, so even today’s young and middle aged adults are not as well suited for sitting and ‘taking in’ for long periods of time as they used to be. We could bemoan that all day, but what’s the point? In past centuries, the congregation was illiterate. (Maybe we’re headed back there.) You work with the realities in front of you.

I glanced around at one point during yesterday morning's service at my church, and it struck me that a vast majority of attendees were eating & drinking in the auditorium. In fact, they were doing these things in unison. Oh yeah, we happened to be observing Communion together. =)

Then too, I'm never surprised when I see people in my church's auditorium sipping from a water bottle or a (lidded) coffee cup. We have theater-style seats in the auditorium with cup holders attached, so the assumption that this is acceptable was designed into the room.

Somehow I think there's a balance between the old (1950s? 1960s?) "Children should be seen and not heard" and people bringing their full breakfast and PlayStation into the service. Perhaps it ought to be a bit akin to a meeting in the office--it's OK to bring a cup of coffee, but not their whole breakfast? There is also the warning from Paul "don't you have homes where you can eat and drink?", and that's of course addressed at gluttony and drunkenness.

Overall, I'm leaning towards the "business meeting" model. Everybody knows you can take a sip of coffee there, maybe a light snack, and there's some place where that goes from unobtrusive to really distracting. Historically speaking, I'm guessing that the ancient church probably had at least water to drink for members who were slaves getting off duty for service--guys who had say one hour to attend, didn't have time to get their meal, etc..