As a minister specializing in Christian Education and Youth for 37 years, I slowly came to a realization of what was going on about 25 years ago and have confirmed it in the intervening time.
A couple of “ah-ha” moments brought the phenomenon to my attention and led to testing the thesis in a real congregation. I will tell you those stories and conclude with a discussion of the issues raised and what to do about them.
Event 1: In a church in which I served, we had “extended session” for the children during worship. A middle-aged man volunteered every year to be one of the leaders. He was late coming to the faith and had a deep faith, but declined opportunities to take a break from the children’s program and attend the worship service. When he finally agreed to go, his responses were interesting — he fidgeted, wiggled, would leave to go to the bathroom, kept losing attention, would sit when he was supposed to be standing and vice versa — exactly the kind of behavior we see in children or youth when first exposed to worship.
Event 2: In another congregation I had a series of older members come to me, sometimes in tears, to confide that their adult children were essentially unchurched. They would comment that they had “raised their children in the church.” Their children had attended Sunday School and had been in the Youth Group; their upbringing did not include worship. There was nothing left to tie them to the church.
This led to an experiment in that church. It was a hard sell and controversial, but it was a stable church staff and we convinced the congregation to give it try. We did away with the “Extended Session” alternative to worship, introduced a worship training class for Kindergarten to 2nd grade (using Gateways to Worship, Carolyn C. Brown, Abingdon Press, Nashville Tenn., 1989, currently out of print). We made both services “child friendly” without “dumbing down” and we encouraged families to come worship with their children without worry about them doing something inappropriate.
Over time we found that the children were settling in, getting comfortable with worship, and participating more. After a couple of years we no longer needed the worship training class because all those in the target ages had been going to church for years.
When these children hit high school and clearly had other options, they continued to attend. If they needed a ride, they would call around to find one. They might stumble in late poorly dressed and noisily sitting together in the balcony, but they were there week in and week out. The worship services in this church were good, but not spectacular, and they were quite traditional. Keeping in touch with many of these people, I find that as adults many of them are still active in churches around the country. They broke the trends of Presbyterian children disappearing into the great unchurched as adults.
I have worked with many children in four churches and three different parts of the country. The best predictor of whether or not a child will stay with the church as an adult is attending worship as a child.
The proof of the pudding for me is the situation with the “fundamentalist” churches.
Twenty years ago they were beating the pants off of the “mainline” churches. They were growing while we were declining. Their growth was mostly through retaining their children as adults. But at that time it started to be the “in” thing among them to introduce “Children’s Church,” a more child friendly alternative to worship. At the time I predicted that in 10 years they would start losing their children. The current turmoil in these denominations includes having lost this generation. The adolescents are dropping out. These denominations are now thrashing around trying to find an explanation and trying to make worship more “exciting,” “more relevant,” “more contemporary.” Sound familiar?
I propose a less anecdotal explanation of the phenomenon. Early in my ministry people were still saying the teens and young adults would “be back” after they graduated from college, got married, or had children. That wasn’t going to happen. The problem is in the word “back” — they could not come back to something of which they were never a part. Having outgrown Sunday School and youth group, they had no further connection to church, even though, as the statistics show, they still considered themselves members. When they would try worship, they would find it strange and foreign and they would be very uncomfortable, like my former parishioner. Why should they subject themselves to something of unknown value that made them uncomfortable? On the other hand, what they knew of worship came from church camps, youth conferences, children’s church and such. This is “worship” for these generations. Unfortunately they could no longer attend these services. This is why “contemporary worship” of various sorts appeals to them. They are like the “good old days” for them. “Shine, Jesus, Shine” is one of the old standards for them.
The Barna Research Group did a nationwide random sample study in May 2001 that confirmed this thesis. A summary of this study is found here. It states: “a majority of those who attended church as a youngster still attend regularly today (61%), while a large majority of those who were not churchgoers as children are still absent from churches today (78%).
So, what can we do about this phenomenon?
First, if we want to preserve “traditional worship” then we need to immediately get children back into worship, whatever it takes. From my observations, it appears that 2nd-5th grades seem to be crucial for locking children into worship. K-2 is a good time for a pull out training program. For those not wanting the disruption, the distraction, the unhappy children in worship, this is a small and temporary price to pay to provide our children with a lifetime of worship and connection to the Church. To take the easy way out and provide alternatives to worship would be like not teaching them to read because they get bored.
Reaching those who are no longer children, and are currently lost to the church, is a difficult task. It will undoubtedly require creating “Emergent” or “Contemporary” worship services (depending on the generation we are trying to reach). Getting them to try such a service is very difficult, but again is worth the effort. Many are good people who are deeply religious. They simply do not understand traditional worship. They need an option that they recognize (the hard part) as meaningful and worshipful
Kent Smith is associate pastor of Westside Church, Ridgewood, N.J.
