Years ago I was in a living room and overheard someone talking about having kids in the Sunday morning worship service. “What a weird idea” I thought. “Why would you have kids in the service with the adults? They can’t understand what is happening.”

Today, I have changed my mind and remain a big advocate for children in the worship service. That is why we have implemented family service once a month as well as have the junior and senior high students welcomed in every week.

What changed my mind? Why am I a big advocate for the whole church to be together during the Sunday morning worship service? Here are a few reasons.

Intergenerational Relationships

Having the church split up into different groups on Sunday morning can lead to a segregated church. The kids do Sunday school over here, the youth do their thing over there, and the adults worship somewhere in between. This kind of segregation makes it difficult to create church wide community. The different age groups don’t communicate, connect, or worship God together. Then when the kids turn 18, they graduate from youth group and are welcomed into the sanctuary with the adults. They now enter a foreign place. Church feels like entering a different country with a different language. The greeter sounds like, “Willkommen, junger mann/fräulein” in their minds. So what do the youth do? Many of them leave. Why would I want to be around these “old” people when I can go to a church with everyone my own age? And so, the segregation that began on Sunday mornings finds fulfillment. Churches struggle to turn over to the next generation and younger churches gather separately to replace them.

Where did this segregation model come from? Did the church always do it this way, or is this a more recent idea? Christopher Schlect, in his Critique of Modern Youth Ministry, argues the modern church has followed evolutionary theorists in its age segregation. The one room schoolhouse that held many ages was transformed into classrooms at fixed paces of learning. Championing the “recapitulation theory” was Granville Stanley Hall who used “social applications of Darwin’s work in Biology” to suggest “that individuals evolve through the same stages through which human history has evolved.”¹ Infants and toddlers were equated with pre-savage periods; 8–12-year-olds were considered preadolescents like early pygmies, and then there were adolescents who needed to be removed from the youngers and adults since it was the most critical period of their lives.² Schlect says, “John Dewey, Hall’s most renowned follower, applied these theories to the public school system[,]” thus creating “High Schools to segregate the teens from other children and from adults.” Schlect concludes, “Tragically, the modern evangelical church has followed these trends set by Mann, Hall, Dewy, and others in their field. Many Sunday school programs are now structured according to these innovative stage-theories.”³

Now, I don’t think it is wrong to place our kids at fixed paces of learning or even within peer groups. There is great value in children learning in their peer groups. But I do struggle with completely segregating youth from adults as they grow up in the church.

Imagine if the church praised God together, read His Word together, confessed sins together, and partook of communion together with everyone. Imagine kids having spiritual aunts, uncles, and grandparents in the church. Imagine if older generations collectively poured their wisdom and gifts into the next generation. Imagine if the kids stuck around in their college years because they loved their church too much to leave it.

While it is not a guarantee, family worship services afford a beautiful opportunity at fostering intergenerational relationships within the faith. And all generations stand to benefit collectively from one another.

Long Term Discipleship

Can kids understand anything in the worship service? Can they sit still for an hour? Yes, they can and family services do wonders for their long-term discipleship. Kids are not born knowing how to do anything; we have to teach them, expose them, and walk with them. They don’t know how to swim, make their beds, or even use the bathroom.⁴ The same is true with worshipping God. And what better way to train them than with the adults.

My niece is in fifth grade and she just passed an impressive memory test. She was able, among many other things, to recite John 1:1–7 in Latin. Kids are more capable than we may give them credit for. They may not hear and understand the whole sermon but through exposure and follow up, they are being discipled to hear a sermon for the long run. Learning to hear a sermon in their younger years will significantly impact their maturation in the Scriptures. My wife was raised in the pews with her parents and she still remembers sermons and Scriptures to this day from when she was a little girl. I have found her saying, “Yes, I remember when Pastor Miladin taught on 1 Samuel when I was in junior high.” I’m impressed by her ability to recall doctrine and Scripture from childhood.

There are struggles and even great struggles for kids early on in a worship service. They have trouble sitting still and parents feel like they got nothing out of the sermon.⁵ But here is where thinking about long term discipleship is helpful. Each week as the kids and youth gather to worship with the adults, they are learning how to sit, hear, and respond to God. Week after week, month after month, and year after year the kids mature into being a full part of the service. Parents may have to take their child out of the service from time to time in a season of training. But bringing them back in, setting expectations, and helping them to engage in the worship service will train them to do it themselves. Kids can sit at school. They can sit in cars. They can sit at the dinner table. They can sit in church and learn to engage God, and we can help them. We visited my sister-in-law’s church a few years back and I was impressed by her kids’ ability to not only sit still, but also to engage in the service. Her nine-year-old was taking notes, and her seven and five-year-old sons were quietly paying attention. The three-year-old boy made it through a portion of the service and then went to Sunday School for the rest.

Fosters Family Discipleship

Family worship services reinforce family discipleship. Parents have the greatest responsibility to disciple their own kids in the church, particularly the husband as the spiritual leader. By having families in the worship service, the parents have opportunity to teach by example as well as to help their kids engage God in the worship service. They are both singing the same songs, hearing the same sermons, and reciting the same creeds. This can be tough on parents, especially with little ones, but the long-term discipleship of their kids is in mind and will be worth it.

Parents can help young ones with song lyrics by whispering them just before hand. Parents can write on a piece of paper key words from the Scripture passage and ask their young ones to circle when they hear the word said. Parents can engage their kids after the service and ask questions about the service. Tell me about one of the songs we sung this morning. What did it tell us about God? Tell me about that illustration the pastor used. What point was he trying to make about God?

These are some of the reasons why I am an advocate of the family service in God’s church and why we do what we do. While the family service does not guarantee our hopes for our children, it does help foster important biblical aspects of intergenerational relationships, long-term discipleship, and family discipleship.

In Christ,
Pastor Sean