Loud Child in Church

[Difficile]

We go to a child friendly Church, with lots of families including Ben and his four children. Three of the four go into kid's groups, but the youngest (2), refuses to leave her Dad and wants to stay in the service.

Fine.

Except, Ben then doesn't parent his daughter, Abby, he leaves her to (usually female) friends in the congregation to cope with. Last time he left Abby with her godmother, Jane, who is lovely, but has 3 small children of her own, including twins (3) and a small baby, and her husband took all their kids to the Sunday School, including the baby, to give her a break for an hour.

Abby is very boisterous, loud, and she wants to be played with throughout the service. Jane tried her best to keep Abby quiet, but Ben doesn't bring anything with him to entertain her or feed her (I have also looked after her one week), and try as she might to tell Abby to be quiet it made absolutely no difference.

Jane was clearly embarrassed and flustered, but Ben seemed to be studiously ignoring the fact that Abby was disrupting half the Church. Jane is very quiet and won't say anything about this herself, but she mentioned to me that she felt guilty and upset after last week as she knew how loud Abby had been.

WIBU to say something to Ben this week about essentially using friends as free childcare, and ask that he takes Abby out when she's making too much noise?

Show me where Jesus said that?

So, a single parent of 4 young children comes to a child friendly service and the youngest one is loud and demanding? Maybe you and your fellow Christians need to be prepared to support Ben during what must be a very difficult phase of his life, take the onus off Jane and share responsibility for a child who is quite needy since her mother is not on the scene, rather than complaining on MN about her disruptive behaviour. Wouldn't that be the 'Christian' thing to do?

The congregation is there for collective worship; it's not a West End show or a cinema. Children are equal members of the church family, not a nuisance to be kept quiet or out of sight.

Agree with this.
In church everyone’s needs matter and ‘family’ does not only mean children. Many come into church needing a bit of space and reflection. That doesn’t mean silence. But clear disruption and lack of respect for proceedings can ruin it for them. Why does Abby’s ‘needs’ trump theirs.
I have no objection to children in church and don’t mind a bit of low level noise. But not this sort of thing.

We moved churches for this very reason. My teenage child has sensory problems and just couldn’t cope with the noise. We attend a lovely quiet church now.
I have sympathy for the dad, he’s obviously completely overwhelmed. She won’t be two for long and will grow out of it.

Well, agreed on that, and I’ve been contentedly atheist for decades, but on the other hand, I’ve never attended a Catholic service of any kind in any country (funeral, wedding, baptism, ordinary mass) where children being noisy has been considered a problem to the extent I often see on here in relation to other denominations. Having said that, I’ve never come across a C of E service that advertises itself as ‘child-friendly’ or ‘family’, but which in fact means ‘babies are looked after elsewhere in a crèche and older children are also taken out of the church to be given separate activities’, apparently so that adults can essentially have a child-free service.

The C of E church in our old village had a family service I attended a couple of times when we’d just moved in, and while there was a Sunday school in the adjacent hall, it was only for part of the service — the rest of the time, the church was filled with of children being mildly noisy, Thete was a space at the back with toys, and there were action songs etc. People without children, or who wanted peace, attended a quieter earlier service.