Children’s Church
Pastor Dave Monreal, Lead Pastor
I had to laugh when I read an article about a historic situation in the church in the 17th century. It seems they couldn’t decide what was the appropriate thing to do with children in the morning worship service. I thought, whew, I’m glad we figured that one out! Just kidding. I know that in every church this is an ongoing discussion. There are no biblical mandates on what, if anything, the church should do specifically for children. We know that the Lord loves the little children, and we need to raise up the next generation for Christ, but it is left to the church to use wisdom and evaluate circumstances to decide what is best at this moment in this place.
When I was a lead pastor of a larger church, we noticed a curious phenomenon. We had many middle school kids and a fair bit of high school kids, but no college age or young adults save a few that still came with their parents. What happened? We had two interns one summer, so we commissioned them to work with one of the professors of statistics to come up with a survey and call each of the college aged or young adult aged person who attended youth group over the last five years. There were close to 100 people who were surveyed. One of the questions was related why they stopped going to church once they stopped attending our youth group. The answer floored us. Many of them said, “Well, we never really went to “church.”
This generated much discussion and follow-up questions to these particular individuals to find out what exactly was going on. They told us that their Sunday school class was held at the same time as the 2nd church service. Their parents would drop them off in their room and then the parents would attend church then pick them up after the service. They had gone to Sunday school all these years, but they rarely attended the “adult” worship service. Unwittingly we had a part in training them to not attend the church service! Also, since everything was geared towards their age, they were unfamiliar and uncomfortable being in an all-ages service that had infants not in the nursery all the way up to those pushing 100 years old!
Because of these considerations we thought it was important to have them attend church service with their parents so they can become familiar with and appreciate a service that was for the whole church. Much like we do here at CAC, we had all the students in the service until before the sermon then the preschool and elementary were released and they had their own “children’s church” with a message directed specifically at them. With older students we wanted to encourage parents to help their children become familiar with the service and find value in it. The fear was we would lose people from Sunday school. The opposite was actually the case. The parents wanted their kids in Sunday school and decided to stay themselves and attend an adult class. And the influx of students in the service gave us the full range of ages that we were missing to be more fully be the whole body of Christ.
This is some of the rationale for why we have the preschool and elementary children in the worship service and why we dismiss them part way through the service for “children’s church.” As I said, this isn’t a biblical mandate which means we must continue to evaluate to decided what is best for our children at this moment. What is best now may not be the best in a future time. Even using the word “best” can be misleading because there may be several good options and we have decided to select one of them to be the direction will go. We are always open to your wisdom and suggestions so please feel free to share!
