Sunday Library.

A Mary Jane Wilkie of New York City is worried:

In metropolitan areas, many Episcopal churches struggle with building and maintaining a healthy Sunday school. For such churches, resources are few, space is scarce, and parents are unclear about what they want for their children. Most churches lack a corps of competent teachers, and some congregations are too small to offer the "critical mass" needed to recruit such a corps.

Well, when your Presiding Bishop says we're the posh, and having kids is something only those Papist proles do, it's kinda hard to maintain numbers for a healthy Sunday School. And it is beyond me why any Episcopal congregation would be "too small" anymore, or their "resources too few", what with all that 'full inclusion' and 'radical welcome' swelling the pews and the collection plates.

Oh, wait...

Not to worry, dear readers, Ms. Wilkie has a cunning proposal to deal with all this, and get young Episcopalians attached to their church: Ship 'em off:

I propose that, rather than wrestle with obstacles individually, churches could work collectively. Those in a specific geographic area could establish a center for children's spiritual development, to serve that area's churches on Sunday. Parents could leave their children at the center, and worship in the church of their choice, thus seeing to their own spiritual growth.

Yeah, we wouldn't want the little rugrats getting in the way of some spiritual 'me' time for mom and dad (or - because this is an Episcopal church - mom and mom, or dad and dad, or mom and new boyfriend, or dad and one-night-stand, or mom and dad and their 'roommate'...). Nothing says bonding like separation. But impressions are important to Ms. Wilkie, and she doesn't want a soul to get the impression that this is, y'know, our church:

To avoid the impression that it is the Sunday school of one particular church, the facility could even be a non-church, e.g., a school or a library.

Limiting it to a particular church is sooo un-Episcopalian. It could hurt the feelings of the Presbyterians down the street, and we all know how nasty pissed-off Presbyterians can be. When you consider it with that with-it, hip, cool, think-outside-the-Epistles 'Piskie outlook, libraries are the perfect place for Lefty group religious instruction. Ignore for a minute the pesky church/state separation issues it would raise (though a sound "Episcopal theology doesn't have much church in it anymore" defense could easily win that argument), I'm sure when we all think of worshipful spaces, the first image we have is book stacks and out-of-date computers.

But Ms. Wilkie is seeing the long game. Because she knows none of us live that false Ozzie and Harriet world anymore, where mom and dad are 1) still married to each other, and 2) mom and dad want to participate in church life as a family. (I mean, really - how... Republican!!) :

In an ideal world, parents and their children would grow spiritually in one place, and most of us are attached to our specific church, cringing at the thought of not having it available for our children. We should, however, consider the long-term consequences of continuing as is.

And the consequence of Ms. Wilkie's proposal would be that our children will have no real experiential memory of their specific church as a place of worship. And when it comes time for them to love it and care for it as we did, they will have no investment in it, and no interest in keeping it.

Now when they sell it and it becomes the neighborhood library...