I have posted this to stir a healthy “debate” on the subject of children in worship in our Churches. Whether you agree with Boice or not, the fact is his brief article is worth our attention for no other reason than that most churches I have been to and have been a part of much prefer the children not only “not to be heard” but also “not to be seen”. Thus, they are sent off either to Sunday School or a separate “Children’s Worship” when the preaching begins. I have often said that if children are not taught from birth to learn to worship together with the adults, we should not be surprised if they should find worship such a “boring” exercise when they become teenagers. Why? For they have not been taught and, therefore, are not used to the routine of listening to a sermon. I also believe with Boice that we adults underestimate the ability of children to be a part of our normal worship service. I can testify from personal experience that they can absorb more than we assume. I shall never forget an occasion when after having preached in a Church in the USA, a young girl of eight approached me after the service and asked if I had my sermons taped in Malaysia. She thought that if I did, she would like to have me send her some! Another young lady of eleven, as I was preaching through Romans, told me she could understand about 50 percent of my sermons. Mind you, there were adults then who complained that the sermons were too difficult! Does that not say something about the adults in many of our Churches? Surely our Lord knew what He was praying when He said in Matthew 11:25-26, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.” And are we not told that He was “indignant” when His disciples tried to prevent folks from bringing “little children” to Him (Mark 10:13-16)? And did He not warn His disciples that “if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea” (Matthew 18:6)? Perhaps it is time we adults begin to realize how much we can learn from little children and from having them with us in worship and from observing their simple faith and trust in Christ during worship. James Montgomery Boice was pastor of the renowned Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia and has authored many books, notably his sermons on Genesis, the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of John, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Minor Prophets, and Foundations of the Christian Faith (a series of studies on Christian doctrines modelled after John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion).
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My first reason is that children’s sermons distract people from the worship of God. They are meant to involve children in the worship service by offering something appropriate to their age. But the effect, whether intentional or not, is to focus the attention of the adults on the children, and that is not what we should be coming to church to do. We should be focusing on God. I find that when children are invited forward to hear some cute word from the minister, the adults perk up and begin to pay close attention to the children. They are amused. They laugh. It is a bright spot in the service. But it is not worship. Children’s sermons sidetrack worship even if it has been going on previously, which often it has not. In practice children’s sermons come dangerously close to idolatry since they invite worship of the fruit of our loins rather than the Lord.
My second reason is that children’s sermons are part of what I see as an overall bad direction in which services have been moving. They are a part of what we call “dumbing down” in other disciplines. Let me put it this way. The goal we should have with our children is to bring them up to the level of the adults; that is, to enable them to begin to function on an adult level in their relationships to God. But what we have succeeded in doing instead is to bring the adults down to the level of the children. In many churches the sermon is hardly suited to any genuinely adult mind, the praise choruses would fit better at a high school rally than in the worship of the Bible’s God, and the children’s sermons probably speak as much to adult immaturity as to the children. In fact, the children’s sermons are usually geared to the smallest children, and the older children are ignored.
The defense of this bad practice is probably that children cannot follow what goes on in church. But that is not true. They can. And even if they cannot follow what goes on at first, our task is to teach them so they both can and will. And why not? It does not require much more time to teach children to participate in the worship service than it does to prepare some of the children’s sermons I have heard.
We have thought about this challenge at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia and have developed a few ideas that we find work pretty well.
First, we keep the children in church from a much younger age than we used to do. We still take the very little ones out for the parents’ sake as much as for theirs. We don’t want excessive distractions for anyone. But we keep the children in church from the second grade up. They can read at this age as well as participate, and we think it is good for our families to be worshiping together.
Second, we prepare a children’s bulletin which the children pick up when the adults receive theirs. The children’s bulletin contains the text of such service items as the Apostles’ Creed, and there are side bars and added texts with arrows to explain what various words or phrases occurring in the service mean. The third page contains a one paragraph summary of the sermon with several questions about it for the older children and a “word alert” section for those who are younger. “Word alert” lists words they can listen for.
Third, both the organist and I come to the opening exercises of the Sunday School to talk about the sermon and the hymns. I explain what I am going to be talking about and what the children should look for. I even ask them to pray that people who are not Christians may hear what God has to say and be converted. The organist tells about the hymns we will sing, who wrote them, and why we sing them as we do.
By the way, we teach the children hymns instead of choruses, since they learn them easily at this age. We have them memorize a children’s catechism and large blocks of Scripture too, believing that it is a serious mistake to waste precious Sunday School time with mere games or trivia.
I would like to get pastors and other church leaders to rethink what we are doing with our children. There is more than one way of causing these little ones to stumble.
Copyright-James Montgomery Boice
