Things I Never Understood About Church, Part 3: Children’s Church

Okay, by this point I have probably briefly offended or confused just about everyone out there. Planning ahead, full-time pastors, now children’s church? But stick with me for a minute.

When I was a kid, our church had Sunday school classes before the service started, based on age groups. Newborn to 5, 6-8, 9-12, 13-18, adults. The teachers of the kids’ Sunday school classes taught each week’s lesson in a way that was understandable to the children in their particular age group. And then, once Sunday school was over, everyone went to the service, kids and adults alike. The whole family was together in church, singing together, hearing the same message together.

So naturally, my first reaction to the idea of children’s church, where the kids spend the entire service segregated from the adults was not positive. And I’ll be honest—sometimes I still struggle with this concept. Please don’t throw things at me. ;)

On one hand, there is the need to teach children about God in a way that they will understand. When you’re teaching a child about anything else—how to read, for example—you don’t just toss a piece of classic literature at them; you start with the basics. Letters and their sounds, putting the sounds together, reading small words, reading age-appropriate books. Eventually they will be ready for Dostoevsky, but not yet. The same is true for teaching them about God; start in a way that they will understand, and work your way up from there.

But on the other hand, there is the importance of a family being together in church to worship God. I don’t think that’s something that should be overlooked, and that is where my struggle comes in. I want my kids to learn about God in age-appropriate ways so they will understand—but I also want them to be around adults who are worshipping and learning about God. I think it’s a valuable experience for a family to be together in church.

How do we find a good balance between the two? I don’t know. I think the best way I have seen this handled so far was in a church we attended for a while a couple years ago. Everyone, adults and children, whole families, stayed together for worship. Then the pastor called the children up to the front, where they sat with him and he talked to them for just a few minutes; he always shared the theme of that day’s sermon in a way that children could relate to. Then the children went to their age-based classes for the remainder of the service, while the adults stayed for the “grown-up” version of the sermon. That, to me, is a good balance of family worship and age-appropriate teaching/learning.

I think it’s a good thing to have children’s church, because we do want the kids in our churches to learn about God in ways that make sense to them. But I don’t think it is necessary to completely sacrifice having the whole family together. As with everything else I have written about so far in this series, I think it can be taken too far in either direction (complete segregation of children and adults vs no age-appropriate teaching for children at all). I think balance is the key.