What about it? There’s absolutely nothing “wrong” with kids church. But pulling kids OUT of the central place of worship with their worshipping community on a consistent basis is also pulling them out of the place of relationship-building, name-saying, communal-praying, and gift-giving. Kid’s Church might teach the how to sing songs and memorize verses but it cannot teach children to be a part of a multigenerational body, an intergenerational community, building the means to establish lifelong bonds of generational discipleship.
In fact, if it serves to replace the larger gathered time of worship, it can do the exact opposite. It can create divisions and gaps in relationships that segregate and separate generations.
All the reasons children shouldn’t go to church can be narrowed down to one:
We don’t want them there.
We don’t want to create a worship service that intentionally and specifically incorporates every generation every single Sunday. We want an adult worship space sans distraction. We want a space that is exclusively an adult worship service and we want that space to be Sunday morning.
We don’t want Sunday morning to be a time where all ages can gather to worship. We don’t want to create age-specific ministries geared at specific ages during other times of the week. We are content to cater to adults on Sunday morning, pull children and youth away for their own age-appropriate ministries, and rarely if ever create space for worshiping communities to gather across generations to learn, love, and live together.
It takes work. As evidenced by the posts and comments on all the ways to make the Christmas services “kid-friendly.”
It requires grace as mentioned by commenters that have to ask adults to offer grace to the kids and parents “just this once.”
It requires humility, understanding that when Jesus said we could learn from children, it wasn’t metaphoric and we need to be in spaces where we can learn from them.
It requires leaving behind a mindset we may have always known that says children have their place and we have ours and we don’t belong in worshiping spaces together.
If children aren’t in our worship services on a consistent basis, there is only one reason why they are not there. We, the adults, don’t want them there. And that’s where we need to start. When Sunday morning stops being an adult service, it starts being a place for the church to gather together, children and youth, young adults and senior adults, all generations together — the body of Christ.
This article originally appeared here and is used by permission.
