Is there a place for church members without children?

I wonder what feeling genuinely welcome means to you. In this column I am speaking to a range of people from around the URC about their experiences of church and what welcome might feel like, for them.

This month’s columnist exemplifies the importance of intersections: people can be discriminated against due to more than one legally protected characteristic. In this case, age and maternity status have led to a church member being treated differently. While she does not report feeling unwelcome, her testimony shows that welcome goes beyond the ‘welcome’ itself, to the way in which churches should actively include people. Her story is one that I hear regularly and which must be heard. I was also glad to see the term ‘missing generation’ in quote marks – because we aren’t missing, we are here, even if churches often don’t notice….

This column is curated by Alex Clare-Young, a leisure sector pioneer special category minister for the URC in Cambridge. This month’s contributor is anonymous.

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This is an extract from an article published in the February 2023 edition of Reform

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