Creating A Church Education Environment for Youth
Our Ambassadors read a flier advertising a church’s upcoming Vacation Bible School. It advertised classes for children up to age 10. Fourth grade.
Ten!
Ten is still fairly young to be the cut off age for the type of program VBS can be.
Many adults remember very little of their childhood before the age of eight. When these children become parents in another 10 or 15 years, they will have little to remember of Bible School to want to pass on to the next generation.
When Christian education stops at age 10, you end up in a few years with a church of unknowledgeable members—and probably a lot fewer of them. These unknowledgeable members will be expected to lead the church and vote on ministry decisions both within their congregations and in the broader Christian community. Without a strong church education, they will be puppets of the strongest influencers. We will become a Church of followers.
Why is age ten the cut off?
The easiest answer is that’s the age when children become involved in other activities.
But that’s the easy answer. There are other reasons. Some of them involve the Church’s inability to serve this age group.
Admittedly, the Church competes with a broad spectrum of organized activities for older children. It would be a shame if we were abandoning our youth’s faith because we have nothing to offer.
Children, still under the influence of parents, will find time when the family sees Christian education as a priority and when the educational experience meets their developmental needs. It is not acceptable to turn our backs on youth because we don’t know how to serve them and are unwilling to find a way.
Here are the challenges:
Older children are more work! Ten or eleven is the age that children are starting to come into their own and are more difficult for inexperienced volunteer teachers to handle. If we can’t train volunteers to work with our youth, we must find them. (See VBS-Aid concept).
It’s also the age when learning must become experiential. Older children cannot be confined to classroom talk. They must be challenged.
If churches want to continue to nurture youth beyond the age of ten, they must create learning environments and experiences that meet the children where they are developmentally.
The challenge of teaching older children requires more time. Older children must participate in a program with a sense of accomplishment or they won’t return. They must be free to experiment and discover their abilities. Middle School teaching is known for being hands on. A summer program for youth requires more than five days.
Older children need camaraderie. They want to be part of groups. Five day Bible Schools are not long enough to create a sense of community unless the activity is more intense than a classroom atmosphere usually allows.
Children this age need to be silly. We expect them to try new skills. They are self-conscious and prone to taking themselves seriously. Church education for children this age should give them a chance to laugh at themselves and just open up. Allowing them to be silly gives them a soft place to fall.
At times, children this age need to be dealt with in subdivided groups. While this goes against modern inclusive thinking, other fields are meeting the challenges of interesting youth by developing some separate programming along gender lines. One reason sports is perennially popular for this age is that sports recognizes this need. The music and art world is discovering that boys become involved with enthusiasm when they are not with girls. Ask boys this age to sing with girls and you will get very few volunteers. Allow them to sing with just boys and they sing with an energy you would never see in a mixed chorus. Here is a video posted by one proud teenage boy singer. Boys-only ballet programs are cropping up and improving enrolments. Here’s video about boy dancers. Giving girls a chance to bond as girls has similar benefits. They are maturing at a different rate and may need a forum for what’s on their minds. The challenge is to make sure that their time together is enhancing their potential not excluding them.
Programs that separate boys and girls find that when the groups merge (which should be often) there is greater involvement among both boys and girls.
Churches rarely take the time to consider educational developments like this, but there may be something for us to learn.
If we want our young people to continue their church involvement into adulthood, all congregations must address the challenge. To assume lack of interest on the part of young people without any effort to interest them is short-changing them and our future.