2. Every kid needs others voices in their life that are saying the same things their parents are.
3. You can only see and fully understand certain things about God in the context of biblical community. If you think you can walk out the gospel in the context of just your family, you don’t understand the gospel. It has to be worked out in biblical community. The gospel can be learned in a smaller setting, but has to be worked out in a broader setting. When I speak of community, I don’t mean church attendance alone but serving in the church. Living in community means you bump up against other people and have to work out the implications of that. Community is not creating a buffer of niceness between you and other members of the community.
Bonhoeffer says this about Community
Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. No Christian community is more or less than this…
What does this mean? It means, first, that a Christian needs others because of Jesus Christ. It means, second, that a Christian comes to others only through Jesus Christ. It means, third, that in Jesus Christ we have been chosen from eternity, accepted in time, and united for eternity.
4. Unless your church goes out of its way to make church work for 5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds (which most churches do not) by taking time to publicly explain things to kids and singing songs that kids understand and enjoy, then I would argue an age-appropriate environment is needed to allow kids and teens to grow understand and teach others.
5. Lastly kids and youth ministry allow kids to discover, grow and use the talents God has given them. In most churches, you may see kids be “Jr ushers” in big church, but for kids to see themselves as valuable contributing members of the body of Christ is priceless.
The thing that frustrates me in this whole argument is that we all have this tendency to be dogmatic about the the things that the Bible isn’t dogmatic about. We froth and fuss over the validity of kids and youth ministry but avoid the weightier things like are we living the gospel in our homes and in our churches.
Kids don’t walk away from their faith because of youth group; they walk away from their faith because they never came to a clear understanding of the gospel. So if you want to be dogmatic about something, be dogmatic about gospel clarity.
