The Strategy is Love: Children in Church

In February 2024, I spoke at the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship symposium on Intergenerational Worship and Worship with Children. I prepared for months and tried to figure out how to boil down strategies, statistics, and best practices into an hour that would be applicable across a variety of contexts and church cultures.

The morning after I arrived, I took a pre-breakfast walk in the nature preserve behind the conference center to collect my thoughts and pray. Is there something I should be saying that I'm not? Is there something I'm not listening to? Should I rework anything?

And as I walked, so many of my preparations came together in the phrase, "the strategy is love". In our weekly worship service, we receive God's love as a community, actively love the children in our congregation, and then inviting them to join us in expressing our love to God through worship. Rather than focusing on managing behavior or entertaining children, we welcome them in to the joy of God's love. God is at work in our community, and God knows how to connect with the hearts and minds of the children he created and loves.

This conference was unique for me because most of the attendees were worship directors or senior pastors rather than children's ministry directors. So often when I work with children's ministry directors, they say things like, "I know this, and you know this, but my senior pastor just wants to be assured that the "kid situation" is off his plate. He's busy and stretched thin, and he can't take on running this, too.

But this is only partly true. The pastoral leaders need to be able to entrust the practicalities of children's ministries to a team of leaders, but the leadership of the church also sets the tone of how we relate to children. Jesus himself was not too busy or too important for children. The pastor has social power and leadership responsibility to lead in welcoming children verbally and by example. I've seen this through small moments of personal affirmation, "Hi, Davy, I'm glad you're here today!" or "Jack, I love your boots!" and the way our clergy communicate about children's involvement: "We think it's important for our children kindergarten and older to stay in for the whole service on prayer Sundays so that they can join us to pray, be prayed for, and have prayer ministry normalized in their understanding of what it means to be part of the Church. We will have a very short message and then be moving around a bit as we pray over people. They can participate fully in this ministry, and we want them to be here today."

Finally, leading with love and joy welcomes children not as an end to themselves but as fellow participants in worship; loving and glorifying God is the end goal. It's easy to set up children's ministries to focus so heavily on catering children that we seek to glorify childhood rather than worship God. Catering to children and families is not the end goal, instead we seek to build scaffolds to welcome them into the end goal of worship. Then we draw them into the joy and love of Christ by modeling how we enjoy him, how we delight in worshiping together, how we prioritize worship in community. They learn to love what we love by being loved, ultimately finding Christ himself as the ultimate source of all Love.