Raising a Child Who Won't Worship

I'm 29 cities into the 75 city tour and sitting alone in a loud bar somewhere outside of Richmond. It was the only place I could find wireless, as the hotel's wireless didn't work tonight.

I've enjoyed the hospitality of old FINKS Dave and PJ at Phoenix, MD, Bob and Becky in Basking Ridge, NJ,  Cindy in Phoenixville, PA, and just today new FINK Judy at Crossroads UMC in Ashburn, VA, just outside of DC. Richmond tomorrow, then a day off to drive the back roads through the Smokies, then a conference in Lebanon, TN (Nashville) and a meeting with the UMC, Lake St. Louis and a conference with Concordia Publishing, Lincoln, Sioux Falls, and Mankato with our old CEO FINK Patrick Patterson, then a day off all alone at my cabin before the west coast tour begins.

I'm running into churches who continue to run worship concurrent with Sunday School. They are perpetuating a number of systemic problems and setting their churches up for long-term slow death by doing this.

They are setting up a system where people choose between worship and education, where mothers (mostly mothers) are teaching Sunday Schools and children RARELY see a male faith role model, let alone see their fathers engaging in faith issues with them. They are knocking their heads against the walls to recruit teachers who don't want to be there, and then enabling people to drop their kids off and disengage from their faith lives. They are setting up a system that recruits teachers who never worship, and educating kids who never worship, and making it darn convenient for parents and kids to never talk faith together.

It seems to me that the systems we put in place either bless or curse us.

If you set up a system where children DON'T worship, you will raise a young adult who WON'T worship.

I think there's a better way.

Comments

[Amy K]

If you set up a system where children DON'T worship, you will raise a young adult who WON'T worship.- AND END UP WITH ADULTS WHO DON'T WORSHIP!

Yah, that sounds like a great system!

Amen, my friend. Amen

[Denise]

We are struggling with this at our church. I see your vision, I just need help creating it at our church, we have taken steps, but we still have a ways to go. We have a wonderful group of young families, it would be great for them to be together in worship and learning rather than separated in two different places in the church, some in Sunday School some still in worship......help.....with no sense of being together as a family during church...yikes

[Rich Melheim]

The worship service is the ONLY truly cross-generational experience MOST of our kids have in a week. Maybe we need to do a better job at keeping families together in education and engaging them TOGETHER in creating the worship with their arts, then celebrating their arts as part of the worship experience rather than sending them to separate spaces for education and expecting them to sit as spectators in worship as we do OUR show FOR them.