Pastor ‘baptises’ dollies and teddies

- Bishop responds with mild pastoral rebuke

When she herself was a little girl, Pastor Kirsten Knutzen of the church in Sthens (pronounced ‘Stens’, ed.) on Zealand used to baptise her teddies in the hall of their family’s apartment. Further inspiration for her new initiative to baptise children’s dollies and teddies came with the arrival of the Build-a-bear shop in Lyngby. “The idea behind Build-a-bear is to give the bear an identity and a certificate to prove it,” she says to Helsingoer Dagblad, “so I thought, Why not baptise the children’s dollies and teddy-bears and give them an extra identity, since we live in a Christian country?”

On her church’s webpage Pastor Knutzen writes: “It’s my experience as a mother and a pastor that from a very early age children begin to wonder: Why must we die? Where do we go when we die? Does God exist? and so on. It’s easiest to deal with such questions if from an early age children have already learned about God.  So at our first dolly-teddy service in 2009 I baptised some 80 dollies and teddies. I used my own words to explain what I was doing. The children and I talked about what it meant to be baptised and our sacristan made up 80 baptismal ‘certificates’. After each service we have an evening meal together, and the children always take something home with them, perhaps a stone from the beach or a magnet with a crocodile if the story was about Moses in the Nile. It’s not so much the object as the thought that counts.”

Parish council backing but Episcopal concern
The idea has the full support of the parish council.  A group of volunteers provide the evening meal, and the church’s knitting-club is offering its services to the dollies and teddies, when the monthly sequence of services culminates in May with the baptism and wedding of the church’s own dolly-teddy couple. Plans are also afoot for a dolly-teddy filmscript where dollies and teddies talk about what they have experienced in their everyday life in church.

However, when the story reached the ears of the Bishop of Helsingoer, Lise-Lotte Rebel, she responded by praising the ’pedagogical initiative’ but mildly reproving the pastor for confusing the sacrament of baptism with the education of the little ones. “I’ve told the pastor that she must be aware of the signal she is sending with her educational initiative. Children’s services are fine, but neither adults nor children must be led to believe that teddies and dollies can actually be baptised.”

The next teddy-dolly service is scheduled for 8th March, but the wedding in May has been cancelled.

 

Edward Broadbridge

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