Background Related to Children and Faith

 by Don Ratcliff, Ph.D.

I can trace my interest in children’s spirituality research to a specific event in 1976, now more than thirty years ago.

When I was 25 years old, in my first or second year of full-time college teaching, I received a telephone call from a friend who was in the Christian education program at Asbury Seminary. He shared with me how much he enjoyed studying moral development under Don Joy. His enthusiasm prompted me to drive perhaps 200 miles to the seminary and spend at least one day, perhaps two, with him and his wife. We went through his notes from the class, discussing important aspects of moral development that were emphasized by Dr. Joy. He then brought out another book they were going to study later in the class, Ronald Goldman’s Religious Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence. Before the day was over, I purchased a copy at the college bookstore, a book that influenced me significantly at the time and for years afterward. Several years later I became personally acquainted with Don Joy, and expressed my appreciation for his work and influence on my life, even though I never sat under his instruction.

While very controversial, Goldman’s work conveyed the importance of high quality research, as well as the centrality of understanding children on their own terms. I did not share Goldman’s self-described “moderate to liberal” theology, nor did I agree with his conclusions that all formal theology should be reserved for teenagers and adults. But after devouring his book, I respected Goldman’s rigor in conducting research, the careful analysis of data, and the thoughtful logic with which he made his arguments. The conclusions that had produced so much heated response in the U.K. during the 1960s seemed to follow, if one began with his philosophical and theological assumptions. As an Evangelical with very different assumptions, I saw value in the data and the importance of not overwhelming children with excessive theological detail, which seemed to me a more balanced conclusion from Goldman’s work.

Over the next thirty years, children’s spiritual and religious development became a central concern in my professional work. While working on a doctoral degree in the 1980s, I wrote brief reviews of the literature, concentrating on the very few studies conducted in the United States . Those reviews were published as two journal articles. I also conducted several of my own research studies in this and related areas, which were published that same decade.  In 1987 James Michael Lee at Religious Education Press read one of my research articles, called to express his appreciation for my work, and asked me to edit The Handbook of Preschool Religious Education, which included several chapters related to religious and spiritual development. This book was soon followed by four other books that I edited and coauthored on children's religious education and related topics, all published by Religious Education Press. In 1989 I was asked by Jim Lee to help in refining and extending a massive summary of the literature related to the religious development of children, much of it conducted in the U.K. , Europe, and Scandinavia . This summary became Religion in Childhood and Adolescence by Kenneth Hyde, published in 1990. An amazing resource, his book summarizes nearly 2000 research studies related to the theological understandings and experiences of children (and related topics). I coauthored three additional books with Paul Meier and Frank Minirth on psychology and Christianity for Baker Books.

In the Fall of 1999 I was asked to participate in a week-long consultation related to the "Children in Worship" project at Concordia University in Chicago , and that same week made an afternoon presentation on qualitative research to doctoral students and faculty in clinical psychology at Wheaton College .In the Spring of 2000 I was asked to return to Concordia University to make a presentation on research for their faculty, and that summer taught a class at Talbot School of Theology/Biola University on using qualitative research methods with children to study their spiritual experiences. Over the years I have served on several doctoral committees, and been sought for consultation by a wide variety of doctoral students in many countries, both in person and by email. These consultations are often the result of faculty and students reading my web pages on qualitative research, located at qualitativeresearch.ratcliffs.net.

During the summer of 2000, I presented some of my research related to naturally emergent forms of children's spirituality at the First International Conference on Children's Spirituality held in Chichester, England . That presentation, which also had been given at an earlier qualitative research conference, was published concurrently as a journal article and an ERIC document. During the Chichester conference I met with several other participants from the United States and Canada to discuss the possibilities of a North American conference that would reflect a more distinctively Christian view of the spirituality of children. Several months later this dream began to materialize when Kevin Lawson, chair of the doctoral program in Educational Studies at Talbot School of Theology, proposed and then was awarded a grant from the Louisville Institute to begin planning the conference. I functioned as a special assistant to Kevin throughout most of the planning process for that first conference, creating and maintaining their web page (childspirituality.org), as well as helping with many other conference-related tasks. The first conference was held June, 2003 at Concordia University in Chicago, I did two sessions at the conference: one on my doctoral research, and the other consisting of a a round-table discussion on research methods in the study of children's spirituality (the panel I led is in the picture at the left). A recording of this session is available at archive.org.

Over the next year, I served as the senior editor for a major book project that came out of the conference, titled Children’s Spirituality: Christian Perspectives, Research, and Applications, and continued to serve on the planning team for the second conference, which was held in June, 2006 at Concordia. A book from this conference includes two chapters that I wrote. I also spoke at the 2009 conference on encouraging parents to spiritually nurture their children.

During the summer of 2006, I co-taught a class for Wheaton College on research methods related to children's spirituality, and one week later taught a doctoral level class on the same topic for Talbot School of Theology/Biola University.

One of my long-standing projects is an online database related to children’s spiritual development, as well as web pages related to parental encouragement of their children’s spirituality. I have interest in “Child Theology" (see childtheology.net), the theological perspectives of children and childhood held by adults throughout church history and in the church today. I am amazed to see how God has used these web pages, as evidenced by statistical data and from the email received from many areas of the globe.