Between September and Advent, our fortnightly all-age services will be focused on young people in the Bible. In each service, one or both of the readings will be centred upon children or young adults, usually as individuals in a narrative, and we shall seek to explore the significance of these biblical passages.

Time and again, in the Old Testament as well as the New, the Bible foregrounds people whose position in their own time would have been considered unimportant, insecure or both. In the first service of our series, the account of Naaman's healing (2 Kings 5.1-15) is set in motion by a young slave girl - surely the most inconsequential position of all in the ancient world - and steered towards its happy conclusion by Naaman's servants, who must also have needed some courage to tell their master he was acting foolishly. The courage, confidence and, indeed, generosity of the 'low-status' individuals in giving advice when they had it to offer is balanced by the good sense of Naaman and his wife in being prepared to listen. Our second service looks at the rescue from danger of the infant Moses (Exodus 1.22-2.10) and the infant Jesus (Matthew 2.13-15); in the first of these, the baby is saved by the quick thinking of an older child. The third 'Young People' service on 8 October is our harvest festival: the theme is 'Using God's gifts responsibly' and the link to youth is John 6.1-14, the only account of the feeding of the five thousand to state that the five loaves and two fishes were provided by a boy.   

Unlike some of the other young people in our Bible passages, in our fourth service ; 'Taking a stand', Daniel and his friends occupied a privileged position. For them, the challenge was whether they would risk their high status to preserve their beliefs and principles, which of course they did. Then, in the fifth service, both the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah and Timothy in the New Testament seem to have felt that their youth disqualified them from the tasks to which God called them, and are firmly reassured that it does not: 'Do not say, "I am only a youth"' (Jeremiah 1.6); 'Let no-one despise your youth' (1 Timothy 4.12).  Finally, on 19 November, we come to two outstanding young servants of the Lord: in the Old Testament, David the shepherd boy (1 Samuel 17.32-37) and in the New Testament, Mary (Luke 1.26-36).

Childhood and youth clearly stand for many different things in the Bible, and the experiences reflected in the biblical narratives are as varied as those of young people in our own time. Sometimes the focus is on innocence, helplessness and vulnerability: Jesus and Moses, as infants, were in real danger, and we cannot read the accounts of their rescue without reflecting on the  millions of children who faced, and still face, terrible threats of one kind and another. More often, however, the emphasis is on how much the young can contribute if only they are allowed to do so, and how often the unravelling of a seemingly insuperable problem is set in motion by the generous initiative of a child or youth. For ourselves, the message must be that we should not only nurture and protect our young people but also that we should trust and encourage them to be active participants in our church life. For this reason, our 'Young People in the Bible' sequence will go hand in hand with a campaign to involve our younger members in increasingly responsible roles within the church.