Where are the children in liberation theologies?

I was asked to preach at my daughter’s elementary school on Exodus 3:7–10, the story in which God appears to Moses in a burning bush, acknowledges the misery of the people, and promises to liberate them from their oppression. As I studied the text, I asked myself: Where are the children in this story? They’re suffering under oppression, I realized. God hears the voices of crying children, knows the pain of hurting children, and vows to free them. (They are also literally there in the Hebrew text, where God calls the Israelites “children of Israel.”) I felt I’d been fairly successful in applying a hermeneutic of child liberation theology.

What I hadn’t prepared for was the powerful public reading of the Exodus passage by a second grader—call her Ella. She was a bit nervous during the rehearsal, but when Ella read during the chapel service, she held the microphone with authority and read the story in as clear and powerful a voice as I’ve ever heard anyone read scripture. Here was a child narrating the story of oppressed children, proclaiming how God saw them and would liberate them. Ella embodied child liberation theology simply by being a child who brought God’s saving words to a room full of children, teachers, and parents.

R. L. Stollar’s years-long writing and practice of child liberation theology has led to The Kingdom of Children. Stollar notes that there “are many types of liberation theology,” each of which is “about equipping and empowering groups of people to discover and speak about God on their own terms and with their own language.” Liberation theology is “a theology of self-determination” toward freedom from oppressive forces and structures. It is concerned with both reflection and praxis—the here and now of day-to-day life.