I always liked children. As a teenage boy, I actually had a middle school teacher who trusted me enough to babysit her little four-year-old son. Babysitting largely consisted of running from this four-year-old boy and throwing him onto soft surfaces in the house. Surprisingly, it all went well. I babysat him several times with no major injuries.
While living as a single young adult, I went years of my life without being exposed to children. My one opportunity to be with children for many years was at an administrative board meeting at the church I was interning at in Watertown, MA. I was so honored that the parents asked me to care for their children. Their toddler got in my personal space, which was strange for me as a man with a very thick and wide personal bubble. It was so sweet and simple. The picture below was from the same time, but with another child who was in the nursery with us.
That community had some children, but they weren’t generally part of the life and work of the church. One of the elderly ladies in the church would usually tend the nursery while the rest of us met for worship on the other side of the building. I didn’t think about children much at that point.
Children’s Ministry in Idaho
It wasn’t until I received my first appointment in Idaho that I spent any time at all really contemplating children in the church. Old folks generally have a sort of obsession with youth. For many, it’s like they can’t be happy unless there is someone young present. I have known so many older folks who do not want to go to the senior center, or even to church, because it has too many old people there.
So there is great incentive to create fun events in the church, plays, pageants, and other such things, to entice children and their parents to come. The largest of my three churches had a tradition of a Christmas pageant. It functioned to attract young children for a season of wonder and merriment. The young families came and went quickly, not to return until the following year’s pageant. Correction: At one of the churches I served, there was a robust Vacation Bible School program every summer because of a capable and committed church member. The kids would show up for that, then disappear until Christmas.
Throughout the year, despite it being a three-point charge, there seemed to be a general dissatisfaction among the people at the amount of time and energy spent attracting children (they wanted more). So I eventually started a midweek children’s discipleship ministry. My photos and videos from these years are pockmarked with special events planned just for children. We had fun together.
Children’s Ministry in Oklahoma
I continued this ministry when I got to Oklahoma, where the Delaware church already had a “Bible Zone” ministry in place. My wife and I worked alongside volunteers in each church to build up the children who came. We dealt with children in families that lived in desperate poverty, parents who were in and out of jail, family members that were regularly high on methamphetamines or opioids. We earned the trust and friendship of many children, many of whom seemed to earnestly yearn for Jesus, but who eventually moved away because their families were too unstable. One young lady, in particular, hungered for baptism. After a prolonged period of catechesis, she was baptized into the church on Easter Day. Very soon after, she moved across the state to live with relatives who continued raising her outside of the church. My understanding from watching her on Facebook is that she has all but fallen away from any sort of recognizable Christian faith.
Building a children’s program in Nowata was, in some senses, easier. We started picking children up from school directly. At one point, we were averaging about 18 weekly attending children between the ages of six and twelve, growing in knowledge of Christian doctrine and scripture. They memorized the catechism (some), knew dozens of faith-oriented songs, and increasingly knew how to navigate their bibles. Even so, it was difficult to get their folks to cooperate. There were significant discipline issues for several of the kids. Parents not only failed to positively reinforce their children’s spiritual development, but actively worked against it by refusing to let their children attend worship and regularly scheduling conflicts with standing activities. Moreover, it grew difficult finding volunteers who were able and willing to attend gatherings reliably and keep the children in line.
My wife and I continued our work with children through the birth of our first child, but after the birth of our second, we finally gave it up. After years of prolonged engagement from the pastor, no laity offered to step in to take my place. I took that as a sign that the ministry needed to conclude.
One might expect from this that the churches I serve would then grow older, with young families disappearing and children going to churches that could better entertain them. There have indeed been several years in which concerns of the church focused on things other than children. This has hurt me as, at my ordination, I vowed to instruct the children in every place I serve. I wouldn’t say that I haven’t instructed children at all, but any sort of regular weekly engagement was lost for many years.
When I first moved back to Oklahoma, I came to understand that youth were very important to the Nowata church, in particular. People regularly hearkened back to the era of the 1990s when the church was bursting at the seams and they were regularly seeing more than two dozen youth at their midweek programming each week. Despite the reality that there was not a whole lot of overlap between midweek youth and Sunday morning worship, the church took pride in the regular activity and presence of youth in those United Methodist walls and halls.
I took time one week to find the names of all of the youth that had been recorded as having attended the youth group for any period of time. At that point, some were old enough to have been reaching their mid-thirties. I compiled a list of over seventy names, then I went down the list and tracked down each one on different social media platforms. A few were nowhere to be found, but I was able to track down the majority. Inquiring about their personal faith lives and where it was that they were worshiping as believers, I learned a good deal. Namely, the vast majority had fallen away from the faith. They did not worship anywhere, nor did they even seem to hunger for Christian community. Some had vocally, publicly abandoned the Christian faith. Many were living with partners out of wedlock. Many were involved in drugs.
The vast majority were not a part of any faith community at all. A handful were involved in nondenominational megachurches (supposedly). I am pessimistic about churches like that forming mature disciples. Even so, that is better than the majority. A few had stayed plugged into the Nowata church. Of those, many have since fallen away, but a couple have come closer and claimed a deep faith, planning now on raising their children in the church that formed them.
The National Context
For many years, people across America noticed that youth did not stick with the church as they graduated high school and either went to college or began adult work. They comforted themselves, saying that they had “planted seeds,” and that they would return when they got married and had children of their own, wanting to raise them in the same way that they were raised. For a couple decades, this did indeed seem to play out. But then it stopped. The youth are no longer returning as adults. As many young people fail to launch and others simply get with the times, we see a demographic shift away from the church among the young.
This is surely partly because they were instructed about the Christian faith in churches that allowed them to believe things like Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, Prosperity Gospel, Liberalism, and Lukewarmth. Many church youth programs taught their youth that one could fit in with the culture and follow Christ at the same time. They said one could follow Jesus without faithfully reading and practicing scripture, maintaining a mature prayer life, or even attending worship. Many youth programs expected youth to self-segregate, to enter the walls of the church without building friendships with adults, to stay immature in their faith and personal lives. There was very little actual work to make these youth grow up into mature adults, taking responsibilities for their own souls, learning to fear the Lord and grow in knowledge of him. When they graduated and became adults, they dropped out because they had no idea that the church is actually something very different from what they had been trained in.
There are, today, still many youth groups that flourish, at least numerically. In my town, one church has a very flashy youth program, where there are weekly social media posts that show exciting games, lots of laughter and excitement. Yet they baptize their children without any serious catechetical work, they expect no overlap with the Sunday morning community, and they give no indication that following Christ requires holiness of heart and life. In my 8 years here, I have already spent much time correcting the pagan false impressions of young folks who were miseducated about the nature of the Christian faith and of the church in that church. Yet before I get too down on them, I have to acknowledge that I have also worked to correct a lot of badly educated young folks who were inculcated by the Methodists.
I know of very few churches that actually do a good job indoctrinating their children in the Christian faith. Statistically speaking, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Mormon communities do the best job. It is no coincidence that they have generally performed much better in protecting their communities from rising atheism and ungodliness in our country.
Within Methodism, I sometimes see churches with large confirmation classes and big youth programs. I wonder how many of those youth know what their bibles say and how to search them, how many have an active prayer life and are seeking sanctification. I wonder how many of their youth can actually explain what they believe and why. I am very doubtful that many Methodist youth are doing well, whether they have United or Global in their denominational title.
The reality is that maintaining a high Christian standard means that many will not be interested. If one desires a large and bustling church, the incentive structure is to offer attractive programs that require very little of people, undercutting the competition (other churches), fighting for the scraps of the increasingly few people who resemble Christians in any sense. Over successive generations, the church has been complicit in the dumbing- and watering-down of our people. We now find ourselves trying to lead some of the most doctrinally ignorant people the church has ever known. This is complicated by the fact that so many of them think they are mature Christians because they have spent most of their lives as part of church communities. People who think they already know what they need to know are not particularly teachable, nor are they good candidates for partnering with the pastor to foster culture shift in established church communities.
If churches are to responsibly train up the young in their midst, that means feeding them with spiritual meat, equipping them within the Sunday morning worshiping community, teaching them to hate the forces of darkness prevailing in the world and warring for their souls. Many children and families are not interested in this, think it is harmful, and run for the doors. It takes a mature church community to let them go, to refuse to compromise the seriousness of the mission. Very few are up to the task.
Promising Signs in Nowata
After years of focusing on holiness at the expense of growth, one day a few months ago I realized we had a number of young folks who kept showing up for worship. We have folks in their twenties and thirties that are yearning to walk in righteousness. Some of them have children. I realized I had to start an intentional effort to minister to these families. Despite the heartache and disappointment of the past, I made some vows that I take pretty seriously. I have to do this.
On Thursday evenings, I have again been meeting with children to sing, read the bible, memorize and talk through a catechism, and pray together. Things are a little different this time than in previous times, though. For starters, the only children who come are those who are in worship on Sunday mornings. Their families are part of the lifeblood of the church. We do not have children with significant discipline issues. If we did, the parents would be correcting them. And I no longer have to strive to get other adults to be present and help keep order. Instead, there is a crew of a few men who have made themselves available each week alongside one of the mothers. They participate in reciting the answers, singing the songs, and praying with the kids. It is something close to ideal.
Because of this consistency, the children have already memorized half of the New City Catechism. They already have a larger base of theological knowledge than most adults. I regularly use them in worship to recite answers to questions that are volunteered by what the scriptures are discussing on any particular Sunday. The children are ministering to the adults.
Moreover, these children are actually friends with one another. They spend time together outside of the church, too. They play together, but they also care about one another. They are quite literally growing in faith alongside one another. It is quite a thing to behold!
There are sure to be trials in the coming years. Satan is constantly at work to destroy our faith, especially the faith of children. He is working to tear apart faithful families and cause resentment within the church. Even so, if we hold together, we will beat back the gates of hell and save many souls along the way.
As I think about the children (and adults) living around me in this little town, I know they need something like this. They need a community of accountability and love, with Christ at its center, to inculcate them in the way that leads to life. Yet so many cannot receive it. I do not think it is our job to convince them that we are what they need. Rather, our job is simply to be the church. And as we continue to actually love one another and actually grow in faith, God will open the eyes and turn the hearts of many around us. And on that day, God help us, we will be ready.