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Children’s Ministry
Where Do Children Worship?

Children’s Church vs Family Worship

Children’s Church

by Dick Gruber, a Children's Pastor in Minnesota

Children sit, stand, squirm, and make their staid Christian parents almost as uneasy as they are through the gathering. Why have this pandemonium? “I say, send the kids to Children’s Church!” Send them to a room where enthusiastic adults and teenagers present the gospel on an understandable level using creative, kid-friendly methodology.

Why send children to Children’s Church?

The Bible was never meant to be boring. Children aren’t made to sit. Children’s church provides constant ministry involvement and training as a child matures through the elementary years. The child who learns to take part as a worship leader, storyteller, actor, or object lesson assistant will grow up to be a Sunday School teacher... or even a pastor. Church was never supposed to be punishment. God’s love isn’t complicated. Children’s church gives you an opportunity to present a simple theme. Using various methods, you repeat that theme until every child knows that theme and has a God-birthed desire to live by it.

Send your children to Children’s Church. Take the first step toward blessing each child by providing a valid worship service where every child can take part, understand, and receive from God.

Family Worship

by Chris Daniel, a Children's Pastor in Florida

The Bible has a lot to say about teaching children. Most of the references have to do with parents teaching their own children, not hired guns or the local church’s children’s department.

Deuteronomy 6:6-7 says “These commandments that I give you today... Impress them on your children... talk about them... at home... as you walk along the road... when you lie down and get up.” It’s difficult for kids to see parents fulfill the Scriptures that instruct us to worship God if they’re in a different room.

The church has done the family a disservice by the dividing of the family.

What a child can learn by experiencing worship with his parents will give him a foundation upon which his life will be based.

According to a recent survey 37% of children disappear from the church in the seventh grade. This is the time when most churches graduate children from the children’s department to the youth department. For the first time, many children have to attend adult church on a regular basis. They can’t handle the structure.

Psalm 78:5-7 says, “He decreed statutes for Jacob and established the law in Israel, for which he commanded our forefathers to teach their children, so the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born, and they would in turn tell their children. Then they would put their trust in God and would not forget his deeds but would keep his commands.”

Is there any question? The Scripture is clear: children should be in worship with their parents.

Condensed from Group’s Children’s Ministry magazine, January/February 1996.

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Last modified October 31, 2000.

Ideabank is a quarterly newsletter published by the Board of Christian Education Ministries, a board of the Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches.

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