Help Kids Engage With Worship Service (Church muscles)
I remarked to another mom at church yesterday that our family’s least Christian time each week was from 8:30 am to 12:30 pm on a Sunday morning. I blew the hair out of my face and tried to cool down from the sweaty, frustrating, and what felt embarrassing, morning of trying to get our three kids to sit still during church. Or even sit. I’d take sitting.
This is our kids’ preferred posture. And even though I have seen them sit through hour and half long movies, my three darlings sneak under chairs, flop in tantrums when asked to join us for singing, and beg to be let outside while playing with toddler toys instead of listening to the message.
Now, our church has a remarkably patient culture when it comes to kids, parenting in the “pews,” and moving around as needed during worship. Still, my husband and I have found ourselves extremely frustrated with our kids who “should know better.”
But then it dawned on us yesterday afternoon. Better than what? What should they know? Who’s supposed to have taught them? Did anyone teach us?
I remember hearing a friend we really respect who leads kids clubs at another area church talk about teaching her students to take notes during sermons. She takes a VAN full of children and sits with them, and I had never even thought of teaching how to listen.
My impulse is usually more toward damage control than discipleship.
The discipleship training I’ve received through Building a Discipling Culture (We are 3dm, Mike Breen) explains discipleship through an apprentice learning model shown by Jesus.
If we are to be discipling our children to also be learners and participants in worship, we’re going to have to work through “enthusiastic inexperience” and “difficult stage” before we even get to growing confidence.
I’m wrestling with this shape and what this looks like in church with kids. At our church, kids help take offering, which feels like a good step in the direction of “I do, you help,” and I often think of early years of kids on laps and helping turn hymnal pages as that stage as well.
I want to push through to “I help, you do.” I want to be building my children’s (who had multiple years not sitting in church because of COVID) stamina and curiosity and skill when it comes to actively learning on a Sunday morning.
I realize there’s a whole other chapter moving from receiving from a teacher or worship leaders to becoming active participants and givers of blessing instead of just consuming content… but here’s where I want to start the conversation with my own family this week.
When Jesus was on earth, he had a body and when he walked and talked, people could see how God acted and talked and showed love. When he returned to heaven, he gave the people who followed him the amazing job of being his body. The way we act, talk and love as a church shows the world what God is like.
When we meet on Sunday morning, it’s like dancing…or exercise. We’re learning to move all the different parts of the body to grow, worship God, connect with other people and practice before heading out into the world.
One of the ways we grow as the body is to listen to music and prayers and a message that people prepare to share. They take a lot of time and energy and listening to God and others and make something to challenge us or invite us to follow Jesus in different ways.
We can respect and receive that hard work by being good listeners during the time we’ve decided to be at church with other people who love God as well. We can help them listen by being quiet and not too distracting, and we can pay attention and take notes so we don’t forget.
With this in mind, a first step we’re going to try is having notes to help kids learn to listen during a worship service. Depending on your kids, it might be a you do, they help, or a they do, you help, kind of activity. At Immanuel, there will be printed copies available, but I wanted to have them digitally in case you wanted to print your own (like for a binder) or edit to fit your family. You can click on the image to access the two PDFs I created.
For older kids and adults, I liked these two pages that others have made and shared:
Fishbowl Family has a ton of great resources that just need you to subscribe to download for free.
And Brianna Siegrist generously shared her sermon note sheets here.
Did you know, that for vegetables, time from pollination to maturity can vary from 4-120 days? And that’s AFTER all the time it takes for the plants to grow and eventually blossom! Helping our kids to build muscles for sitting in church, learning from other believers, and participating actively in the body can seem slow or random or frustrating. But, I love how Galatians 6:9 encourages us: Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.
