Parenting in the Pews

When I was a kid we were always in church. Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, every time the doors were open we were there. I had a lot of energy as a child and sometimes making it through a whole worship service was a bit difficult. One time in particular my dad, who has always taken worship very seriously, had enough of my fidgety disobedient behavior. He picked me up and began to carry me out of the church. I knew there was a bruised backside in my future. So just before we hit the door at the back of the sanctuary I cried out, “Pray for me people, pray for me.” That was a brilliant move on my part. I think my dad laughed so hard he didn’t even spank me.

A regular conversation around my house and with our friends is getting our children more involved and tuned in with worship. My wife and I (I do have a wife and do mention her occasionally) have especially been talking about our daughter who is almost 5. She is finally at an age where she can get parts of the worship service and participate in many of them, but she is too young to realistically expect her to sit and be engaged in an entire worship service. The questions then have been, how do we create worship that encourages children to be involved and how as parents do we educate, instruct, and model worship for our children.

Here are some thoughts on the subject and I would love to hear yours as well. The first thing is that at Christ Church, especially at our new Sunday Night Worship Service, we work to create worship that engages and excites children by allowing them to be children. We have interactive services with music you can get up and move to (we used to have a pretty sweet kids dance section at our old Tuesday night service). We have interactive aspects of the service from the sermon to times of response. We always have a candle altar in the back where anyone can go back and offer prayers at anytime (I suggest trying to help younger kids with fire) and we often have different types of prayer stations where they can go and interact. We also offer a time for our preschool age children to leave the service during the sermon for their own teaching time.

We want to make sure that children can feel comfortable in worship, but also that through participation in the liturgy of our worship that they will over time be formed by their worship. They may not understand everything they say in a prayer, or the full understanding of communion (still working on that mystery myself) but they will grow up in that liturgy and be blessed by it. We also realize that having kids in worship is messy. Screaming babies, etch a sketches hitting the floor, my daughter throwing a tantrum, random questions, bodily functions and more are a regular part of worship with children, but that is alright. Perhaps the reason an entire generation that grew up in the church has left the church is that the worship was so foreign and restrictive that they never grew comfortable.

We are still figuring this whole parenting and worship thing out, but I think it will come along. If you have any great suggestions, funny stories or brilliance to share, please do so.