I know this is controversial, and I know that many would say that if someone is doodling or drawing then they are not paying attention. It is indeed very possible to get so lost in your silly artwork that you are no longer engaged in listening. It is also possible to sit completely still with your hands folded on your lap and for your mind to be in space. We have all done that plenty of times. For me, if my hand is engaged in writing, even drawing, my brain feels less distracted and more focused on the subject. I also understand not everyone is the same, but for this reason I am not opposed to giving children something quiet to write with during the sermon time of worship, and if they use it for drawing, I am okay with that too. I would wager that they are listening and picking up way more than we give them credit for.

For two-thirds of our worship service, there is plenty of engaging activity for little ones. We sing, we read, we pray, we stand, we sit, we kneel, we raise our hands, we eat and drink, we give. All of these are times where a little noise, a little shuffling as we go from one thing to the next, a little movement is expected and necessary. It really is just for the sermon time that we are training our children to sit still, quietly, on their bottoms, facing forward and to listen to the best of their ability without distracting anyone around them. If we are honest with ourselves, it is often difficult for us as grown people to do this.
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With my children, my goal was always to make worship a delight for them and not torturous and to ease them into the focused attention that I was seeking without expecting the same behavior out of a one-year-old that I expect from a fifteen-year-old. I know some parents have very small children who can sit still and quiet without any stimuli, and I remember a time when I wish God had given me one of those. I know some other parents who have tried to force small children to remain still and quiet with nothing to keep them occupied out of principle, and worship ends up being a horribly exhausting experience for them and everyone around them.
The trick is to keep small children quietly busy in a manner which is neither going to draw attention nor distract others. Here are a few ideas we used  with our children when they were small:


1.  From babies to toddlers really the biggest challenge is getting them to the point where they are not hollering randomly just to hear their own voice or fussing for no reason. One way to keep them from shouting is to keep something in their mouth – a bottle, a sippy cup, a pacifier (if you use those.) We often brought little snacks like Cheerios or those puffy rice things, but you don’t give them the bag to rattle or the container to throw or drop or spill. You pour a small handful for you to hold and as you keep the child on your lap you distribute one at a time to keep them busy. As they become a little more alert, a very small toy – a car or a soft animal – or board books can go a long way. We saved special things in the diaper bag that they only saw on Sunday. We also did crayons for drawing on the back of the bulletin or another sheet of paper – not the big box of 96 Crayolas – just two or three crayons which I held tightly in my fist. When they want a new one they have to put the used one back in and pull out a new one. Sometimes just taking and depositing crayons was a quiet activity in itself. If you allow them to color, you don’t want to bring a big coloring book that they can rattle and tear the pages, or drop the whole thing. One sheet of paper, using the hymnal for support, together with three crayons and about twenty Cheerios will get a lap child almost completely through the sermon.  

2.  When our children are growing from toddlers to school age we can start to expect them to sit on their own chairs, or in their own space on the pew. This is the time to slowly stop bringing the snacks and toys. The expectation is that they are going to begin to learn how to keep themselves mentally engaged without flopping around or laying down. But they may quietly turn the pages of a children’s Bible, or another good book. They may color with a handful of crayons on a single sheet of paper. It’s during this time when they will amaze you with questions from the sermon on the way home. They will have heard something that sticks with them, and that shows that they are beginning to listen.  


3.  From kindergarten age through adulthood the expectation is increasing focus and attention. No, early on they are not going to grasp every concept of the scriptures or the sermon, but they should be expected to put the effort into listening to gain as much as they can. You may ask them to write down three important things from the sermon, or to draw a picture based on the content of the text. When they start to take notes in school, you may ask them to take notes from the sermon – to write down the main thoughts and organize the information. The ride home from church, or the Sunday meal is a good time to review their note-keeping.

The purpose through all of this is not to give them something to do so that their minds can wander, but so that they can learn age-appropriate ways of being still, being quiet, and beginning to learn the disciplines of Christian worship.

 In a bygone day children came to church dressed like little adults.  They sat in pews alongside of adults.  They sang the same hymns as adults.  They were expected to be quiet, attentive, and reverent just like the adults.  Of course, this arrangement required patience and charity on the part of the congregation... but I think this model made the Church of a bygone day much stronger than the average contemporary congregation. 
  
Today in many parts of the church world the expectations we have of children are abysmally low.  Is this because American Christianity’s view of children has been shaped more by American culture than by the Bible?  I’m not sure.  Whatever the reason, the result is that we no longer dress children like adults, we don’t ask them to sit alongside of the adults, and we certainly don’t think they are capable of singing the same hymns as adults….  And so we simply whisk our little prepubescent blobs of sunshine away to something called Children’s Church. 

            Is this wise?

            Is this helpful? 

            More importantly, is this practice Biblically defensible? 


 Yes, I know that children are children and they can be restless and even disruptive during church services but is this sufficient reason to amputate children from Christ’s Body?

 At All Souls Church we believe it is NOT.  We believe children are to be welcomed into the Body of Christ just like adults.  Yes, children do need to be instructed at their level, and we have special times set aside for this, but these times do not interfere with the corporate worship of Christ’s Body. 

 Here are a few reasons for our rationale:

I’ve sometimes heard preachers talk about children as being “the future of the church.”  But that is only half right…  Surely they are the present of the church too.  Therefore, if they are in the church shouldn’t they be ministered to as part of the church.

Someone from the peanut gallery objects, “But kids don’t have the understanding to get Big People Church.”  This may be so, but since when have intelligence tests ever determined who we let into our services?  Should the fact that children have the understanding of children be held against them?  By this reasoning we could argue that the senile, the mentally retarded, or even the person who lacks a high school diploma should be excluded…  but this would obviously be wrong.  If there is any place on earth where the “weak and foolish” should be accepted with open arms, it is the church.

I contend that the church of the future depends upon children being ministered to in the church of the present.

By this I mean that what happens in a typical Lord’s Day service needs to become part of a child’s regular experience.  Yes, I understand that this is easier said than done.  Kids are rambunctious and church is…   well…  strange.  That is to say, what happens in church each Lord’s Day is NOT normal.   Pastoral prayers, public scripture readings, corporate singing, sermons, etc., do not typically happen outside of a church setting and therefore MUST become normalized in the lives of our children.  How does this happen?  I can think of no better way than by simply giving children regular exposure to these things – i.e. having them sit through church services.

Unless children grow up in an environment where it is normal to see a man read the bible and where it is normal to listen to a sermon, they are very unlikely to see these things as normal when they become young adults.  We’ve all heard teenagers dismiss church services as “weird” and perhaps we’ve wondered why.  But wouldn’t you think church was weird too if you had spent the totality of your formative years being whisked away from normal Church to a world of flannel graphs, vacuous songs, and moralistic stories?  I would…  and for a long while I did, thanks to Children’s Church.

I contend that church must be normalized in the minds of children through their regular attendance of and participation in Lord’s Day Worship Services.

The Lord has given His Church regular means of grace for their collective benefit.  According to ch.21 of the Westminster Confession of Faith: 

“The reading of the Scriptures... sound preaching…   singing of psalms…  receiving of the sacraments instituted by Christ, are all parts of the ordinary religious worship of God.”

Elsewhere we read that these things are done “to put a visible difference between those that belong unto the Church, and the rest of the world.”  As far as I can tell this must include both the old and young of a given congregation.  The Lord has placed no age limits on the means of grace.

I contend that the regular means of grace are for both big people and little people and are to be received together as one body.

For Americans, segregation is a painful word…  that’s why I deliberately use it here.

America has a dark history of racial segregation and thankfully great strides have been made to right the wrongs associated with it.  Sadly there were even many churches in the past who were segregated along the “color-line.”  But as anyone with a modicum of Biblical knowledge knows, the Bible lends no support to the idea of racially segregated congregations.  It’s bitterly ironic therefore, that we Christians are not quite as quick to recognize other forms of segregation.   Surely age segregation within the Church has no more biblical warrant than racial segregation and I would contend that it is equally as destructive to the Church because it fragments the body of Christ.  Surely, the old and the young are members of one body – Christ’s body.

I contend that God has designed it this way and that we need each other.