Kate tells me Soul:Food arose out of her own experience of becoming a mum. Rather than accepting the usual approaches to parenthood and church - one, that once you get through the first few years you can get back to finding time for God, and two, the model that mainly focuses of the spirituality and faith of your toddler - Kate instead wanted to pursue an approach that would neither patronise the parents nor the children. Influenced by Ignatian spirituality, she seeks to provide a space for parents to meet with God where they are at, in the act of parenting. Nurturing and loving a child is spiritual - there is no need to tack on the spiritual bit.
Soul:Food has been running from September and meets for a short time on Thursday mornings. They have developed a basic liturgy around which the parents and young children can meet with God together, sometimes this involves different activity for the children and parents but based around the same theme, some of the most successful meetings have been where all can engage together in the same activity (certainly not an easy task). Kate told me of one such example where they talked about how they could bring peace to their community, with a model of the local estate and the activity of drawing flowers all over it to prophetically see peace being brought to their neighbourhood.
Kate is keen to stress that they don't have all the answers, and it certainly isn't perfect. There is a question of how sustainable this can be, as Kate already feels it can be hard to think of new creative and imaginative ways of leading both parents and young children to God together. There is also a wall to breakthrough regarding parents viewing this as 'something that Kate runs', as well as the tendency for some to after a while to suggest they now feel able to do 'proper church on a Sunday'.
Despite the widespread rise in popularity of initiatives such as Messy Church (nothing against messy Church!!), it seems that there is little out there that provides better support for the faith of parents themselves. It is encouraging that Kate is attempting to address this need and not settling for a model that leaves either the parents or children uncatered for.
Get in touch if you know of anyone else doing interesting work with parents and toddlers. What resources could you reccommend