Children in Church: Where have all the children gone?

2×2 visits churches. In the last 15 months we have visited 35 congregations — 34 Lutheran and one Presbyterian. Many of the topics we address on our web site are developed around observations made during our visits.

One thing we have noticed almost across the board is that children are not well represented in worship — even in some of the larger churches. Pre-teens and teens are even rarer. This should be alarming to churchwide organizations as this will surely impact the church within 20 years. We suspect it is already impacting ministry with most churches experiencing decline.

A review of ELCA Trend reports reveals that many churches have little in the way of Sunday School programming. We counted 36 churches within a 15-mile radius of our own that have no Vacation Bible School. We have also noticed that modern VBS programming is geared to the very young and for only five days in the summer. Opportunities for Christian education seem to wane from third grade on! What this means is that most children will have only the dimmest memories of ever having any religious education. They are not likely to remember their experience as something valuable they want their own children to have.

Perhaps we are sensitive to this because our own congregation — before we were evicted from our property — was top-heavy with children. It was not unusual for children to outnumber adults in our worship services. Children were also very active in worship throughout the service. Our visits to congregations larger than ours with no children or only a few very young children is a new experience for us.

As we visited, we have noticed many approaches to children in worship, including several styles of children’s sermons, children’s choirs, etc. We want to explore every aspect of children in worship and explore the potential for enhancing the worship experience for a new generation.

On Thursday we will launch a new series, “Children in Worship.” We will explore the topic and we invite your participation. This is a serious challenge for today’s church and it will take many heads to meet it.