Children’s Church (or How to Fail Your Child)
My church “bubble” was such that I was aware that children’s “church” was a thing, but I never saw it on a regular basis or even knew anyone whose kids actively participated in it.
Then we moved.
Our new church situation was such that unless we wanted to hop on an airplane each Sunday morning (literally), we had to choose between Baptist and non-denominational (“Baptist with a cool website,” as they say).
As a quick aside, we did spend several weeks visiting an Episcopal church, but it was possibly the least welcoming church experience imaginable. We may as well have been the unaware dead characters in The Sixth Sense for all of the interaction we had. We will come back to the Episcopal church in a bit.
The churches we visited varied:
- Loud music vs reasonable
- Good preaching vs ehh
- Weekly communion vs monthly
- Locals vs imports
Music
The most conveniently located church (literally just outside our neighborhood) we ruled out because going there made our kids cry. Specifically, the music was so loud they'd have their hands over their ears and eventually break down in tears. I wanted to cover my ears as well, but I wouldn’t allow myself to (decorum or something). Maybe the loud music was for the generally older population? I tried to find seats that weren't directly in front of speakers but it didn't help.
I don’t mind a long church service, but they somehow took 45 minutes of content and turned it into a two+ hour service.
Preaching
I'm aware that most Baptists and non-denominationals are dispensational even if they don’t realize that. If you know what to listen for, you can identify it here and there. However, this one preacher was on-point when it came to dispensationalism – which isn't a good thing. His sermons were depressing. "Live the best life you can, but in the end it won't make any difference." I appreciate that he was logically consistent, but good grief. He and his family were great, and it would have been wonderful to have been a part of that church. The red flag though is how often you have to spend time on the drive home explaining to the kids which things they might have heard that aren't actually true. And this was the case for probably half the churches we visited.
In another example of having to ”deprogram” after church, a member of the church addressed the congregation at length, explaining that if getting baptized once is good, then getting baptized lots of times is better — a stretch of the whole “believer’s baptism” thing that I didn’t realize existed.
Communion
Ignoring the Episcopal church for the moment (which obviously does weekly communion, with wine), we found one church (a non-denominational one) that did weekly communion. It was a strange highlight of an otherwise blah church. They had no local preacher; the sermon was a projected video replay of last week's sermon from the parent church. Most churches used these sealed containers each containing a soggy (or stale — it’s a surprise each time!) styrofoam disk and some purple drink. There’s no better way to imagine a divine feast — the marriage supper of the lamb — than with these sterile elements, but I digress.
People
An interesting observation: aside from one Baptist church which stood out as an exception, all of the legit Baptist churches were exclusively attended by locals, while all of the non-denominational churches were almost exclusively attended by imports. There's probably some historical context that led to this, but I never figured it out. Self-segregation is a funny thing to find "in the wild".
The Ties That Bind
There were generally loose or no connections between these churches, but they did have one thing in common: they seemed hellbent (I use that word intentionally) on keeping children out of the worship service.
One church had an entirely separate, detached building for the children. Parents would drop their kids off on the way to church and pick them back up afterwards. Each Sunday, the same lady in church would let us know that our kids "would have so much more fun" if we dropped them off at children's church – because "fun" is why we are here. "Fun" was the entirety of her sales pitch for children's church, which seemed fitting.
Another church had its children's program run during the typical period of the service, but the parents would just let their kids run around outside until their program started; never to darken the doors of the sanctuary. And the program itself was usually just watching Veggie Tales. Or eating snacks and playing. Awesome. Just own it and call it daycare.
Coming back to the Episcopal church as promised: they kept the children in the worship service from the beginning up to the sermon, then the children were dismissed for their own children's program, and finally they came back for communion and the end of the service. I'm still no fan of children's church, but that was the closest thing I found to an acceptable implementation of it.
Kids: Always Getting in the Way
But why do I rail against this mentality? Because it wreaks of parents viewing children as a distraction to worship, and not a part of it. Kids can certainly be a distraction. They don't sit still like adults. They aren't as quiet as adults. That's okay though. The alternative is that your church can be one generation from extinction (not unlike most of these churches). Also, you can actually train children, although based on how entitled and out-of-control "adults" are displayed in countless social media posts, it seems like training went entirely out of fashion a generation ago. But, yeah, go ahead and put your kids in church daycare.