Keeping Kids Keeping Faith
“As many as 50% of children raised in Christian families drop out of church during their transition from primary school to high school.”
This is what I heard at a recent children’s ministry conference. The speaker was David Goodwin, an Australian pastor, author and researcher, and his report was backed up by studies conducted across the western world. (See Goodwin’s book ‘Lost in Transition – or not?’)
50% – that’s a lot of drop out. Although I was diligently taking notes, my mind was flashing through the faces of children currently attending my church. They are great kids. Kids with personality and spirit. They come up with some terrific answers to the questions thrown at them, and toss some equally curly ones back. But 50%? Is my church happy to agree with the statistics and see half of these children decide, over the next few years, that Jesus is irrelevant? Am I happy with that?
The answer barely needs to be typed here.
Keeping Jesus relevant is crucial.
I found myself thinking over the many ways I’ve seen kids’ church packaged, and yes, it matched that of the report. Somehow we, as churches and families, have ‘programmed’ faith development. We send out kids off to children’s church or Sunday School, we download cleverly worded curriculum and perhaps we even enroll them in Christian schools (my kids are in one), but these alone don’t teach children how to love Jesus. They explain, they entertain, they teach a doctrine of ‘goodness’ – but what about opportunities for tasting the grace of God? Opportunities for personal discovery of the wonder of God?
Another speaker at the conference was Ivy Beckwith, author of ‘Formational Children’s Ministry‘. She challenged me to consider how, if we continually tell children what a Bible passage means, we accidentally remove the aspect of discovery. We prescribe an application, rather than allowing children to explore the living, active word of God and discover the application for themselves. Have we unwittingly downsized the Holy Spirit when teaching kids to read the Bible?
As you can see, I came away from the conference with a lot of questions, but also much encouragement. It isn’t a lost cause, and we don’t need to moan and shrug our shoulders in dismay. Jesus has never been irrelevant and if we’ve accidentally taught him to appear as such, forgiveness is available.
I’ll share more of what I learned at the conference in my next post (Thursday fortnight), but for now – what have you found helps children develop a relevant, meaningful and personal relationship with Christ? How does your church keep kids keep their faith?
Penny Reeve is a children’s writer from Australia. More information about Penny and her books can be found at www.pennyreeve.com