Could skipping church affect your children more than you realize? Should you let your kids skip? At what age is it appropriate to give them such choices? Read on to discover what skipping church can mean. And please share the information with parents in your church and children’s ministry!
Impacts of Skipping Church
A compelling argument exists for not letting children skip church. Check out the question-and-answer time after a panel discussion. It features Kent Hughes, Aimee Byrd, Todd Pruitt, and Carl Trueman at Westminster Theological Seminary.
In the Q&A, Carl Trueman addresses why churches today are losing their young people. Typical answers range from worldly temptations to the irrelevance of the church. But Trueman makes a keen, convicting connection between parenting and apostasy.
“The church is losing its young people because the parents never taught their children that it was important. I think that applies across the board. It applies to family worship, and it also applies to whether you are in church every Sunday and what priority you demonstrate to your children church has on a Sunday. If the sun shines out and their friends are going to the beach, do you decide to skip church and go to the beach? In which case, you send signals to your children that it is not important.” (Carl Trueman)
How Parents Can Keep Kids From Skipping Church
We know that artificially taking your kids to church neither bestows salvation nor guarantees it. External religious acts without heart worship obviously do not honor God. This type of legalism isn’t the subject of this discussion about church attendance.
This is about the weight of responsibility behind how parents prioritize their family’s time and lifestyle choices.
1. This is definitely a heart issue.
Maybe the reason our children have no love for Christ is because we as parents show no love or passion for Christ. That’s evidenced by how we prioritize our time both on Sundays and during the week. When we elevate TV, sports, school, hobbies, and even family itself to a place of idolatry and replace the vital Christian responsibilities? Then we tell our children that Christ is secondary to all these things.
