Today, December 1, we start our series of articles exploring Children in Worship. Let’s begin with how we teach our young people.
The Protestant Church has five traditional avenues of Christian Education. Roman Catholics and some Protestant churches add parochial schools to the mix.
Family Education
Martin Luther was a proponent for the family being the key educators. His Small Catechism was written to help parents with that important task.
Sunday School
Sunday Schools grew out of the Industrial Revolution. Churches saw that children working 12 hours a day Monday to Saturday had no opportunity for education. The movement began in England and spread to the United States and became a societal norm by the mid-1800s. Sunday School was such a strong force in the church that they often organized separately from sponsoring churches with their own leadership, budgets and even social events.
Vacation Bible School
Vacation Bible School had similar roots beginning in 1894, led by a school teacher who felt she did not have enough time to teach Bible during the school year.
Youth Ministry
A fourth component of most Church educational programs is some form of youth ministry. The history of Youth Ministry is more complicated. It also dates to the Industrial Revolution as an attempt to rein in young adults flocking to urban centers to work six days a week and live it up on Sunday. It matured into social and service organizations like the Epworth League and Luther League. These organizations became social mainstays for young people until marriage whether it be in a couple’s twenties or even thirties. In the mid-twentieth centuries the thrust shifted to teens and centered as much on fellowship as service or education.
Confirmation
Denominations have different ways of bringing their young people into full church membership. In the recent past, confirmation or catechetical classes often had a multi-year structure with even small churches confirming a dozen young people every year. These classes provided an intense look at the doctrines of the faith and mentored young people as they grew into church membership.
What we see in the church today are the remnants of these institutions. Things have changed dramatically and, although there may be congregations where elements of the above remain healthy, by and large, every avenue of Christian education faces challenges. This affects worship.
- Families live in increasingly secular worlds.
- Sunday Schools struggle with sporadic attendance and diminishing supply of teachers.
- Vacation Bible Schools have retooled to teach only the youngest children with few teachers willing to give more than a five days of their summer to leadership.
- Fewer youth participate in church life. Youth programs seem to be struggling to identify their purpose and structure.
- Many congregations combine forces for confirmation and still have only a few young people. Confirmation programs which once entailed two or three years of study are often weeks long today. Consequently, confirmands enter church life less prepared for leadership. But at least they have some training. Far more young adults have none!
Education affects worship. Without education, both children and adults understand less about what a church service is all about. It is easy to drift away when a church service is a foreign language.
The church today needs to examine the realities of today’s world and find ways to re-introduce worship to people who have little background in what worship means.
