Is Your Children's Ministry About the Session, or the Child?

When I train children's leaders, I like to ask a simple question: how many of you know what your children's prayer life looks like at home? I jest that 90% of children's leaders have no idea, and the other 10% are lying.

It gets a laugh, but it points at something uncomfortable. Most of us would say, quickly and sincerely, that children's ministry is about the child's walk with God, not about the session. But ask how we follow up on last week's lesson on prayer, and there is often silence. Are we asking whether their prayers have changed? Do we know if they pray at home at all?

The theory is usually there. The practical outworking often isn't.

It was never a choice between wonder and teaching

There has been a debate in children’s ministry that has pulled from didactic teaching – here is the question and here is the answer and at the other end it is pure exploration and wonder: open questions, creative activities, letting children discover truth for themselves.

I don't think it is a line at all - where you sit on this line is far less pertinent than whether you are including a third dimension. You can run an exploratory session that is full of wonder and never helps a child meet God. You can teach a story plainly and clearly and see the same truths come out that a discovery-based approach would reach.

But it’s not an either/or approach. In Scripture we read that there were teachers who explained and expounded God’s word – be it Jesus or the apostles. The early church devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, not just to self-discovery. Yet even the Bereans, who heard Paul preach, went back and searched the Scriptures to check what he said. They were taught and they dug for themselves.

Let's win as many children as we can, by whatever honest means. But I'm wary of any style, creative or didactic, that becomes the point. Repeating a prayer after me puts words in a child's mouth; this doesn’t mean it is their heart response to the teaching. But equally a lump of clay to hold while you pray can become the distraction from God rather than the pathway to him. I once heard a woman in her eighties say she learned to pray when her grandfather sat her on his knee and told her she could talk to her Heavenly Father exactly the way they were talking now. "I don't understand why people need to hold a piece of clay to pray," she said. "Just talk to Jesus."

That simplicity of faith can get buried under activity if we're not careful.

Exploration, explanation, experience... and then what?

Exploration gets a child engaged. Explanation gets a child rooted. This is the horizontal dimension of what we deliver to the children, but without the vertical dimension it is pointless. Whatever your teaching style is, experience of God makes it real. It is this encounter of God that leads to a life lived out for the Lord – where their relationship with Him is exhibited in their lifestyle, their actions and their intentions. Without this our ministry is two-dimensional. As they exhibit faith it will begin to impact their daily lives and routines.

Call it daily time with the Lord, holy habits, or whatever language your church prefers. The point is that the child is praying and reading the Bible by themselves, not only when we put it in front of them.

That was the heart of the discipleship track we built for every child in the ministry I used to lead. Step one was salvation, which is why, once a month whatever our theme, we explained the gospel explicitly and gave children a chance to respond. Step two was rooting them in the faith: the basic theology, and meeting God for themselves. Out of that, we encouraged a daily habit of prayer and Bible reading at home. Some of our children prayed for as many minutes as they were years old.

Why that order? Because I've seen the pattern where a child has a mountaintop moment and says they want to live for Jesus forever, and two months later it's gone. A habit of meeting with God daily is what turns a moment into a life.

And I'd say this to any parent or leader worried about it: you don't need to spend time with your spouse to be married, but if you never do, what kind of marriage is it? The same is true with our children’s relationship with the Lord. Children may well pray with their families, and that's wonderful. But I also want them to have their own time with the Lord. Jesus himself got up early and set himself apart to pray.

If Jesus needed to do that, then we need it even more.

Please don't dumb it down

One parent told me that the age-appropriate Bible reading notes she bought for her twelve-year-old were full of word searches and codes. He asked if he could just have something to read. So now he reads notes written for adults, and one night he told her the trouble with them was that he couldn't sleep, because he kept thinking about the question at the end.

I love that story, because it shows what we sometimes get wrong. We assume children need everything softened and gamified. As they move into a three-dimensional relationship with the Lord they become hungry for meat, not just stories. If our aim is for them to feed themselves, we have to teach them how, and trust them with real material – the Bible itself.

It also connects to something I worry about: for too many people, Bible knowledge never grows beyond Sunday school level. Somewhere along the way we taught them it all and they decided they had no need to dig further. What are we doing at that level that lets that happen?

"Encounter" is not a dirty word

I know some of my language here is Pentecostal, and I'm happy to unpack it. The word encounter makes some people nervous, and there is a real danger behind that nervousness: a faith that becomes all about experience, rather than the truth of God's Word, can drift into something closer to New Age spirituality. I share that concern.

But if we remove encounter altogether, we remove life with God. Imagine Moses without the burning bush, the plagues, the Red Sea or Sinai. Imagine Joseph without the dreams. Imagine the New Testament without any encounter moments. Those God moments are what made their stories worth reading.

When I say I want children to experience God, I don't mean I want them to have an emotional experience. Emotions may well follow, but we aren't aiming at an emotional outcome. We're looking for a revelation of the living God, so that children taste and see that he is good.

Those moments can be small. Our eldest son's first answer to prayer came when he was about three. The bin men had missed our bins three Fridays in a row. After several phone calls and a good deal of ungodly grumbling from his parents, he prayed at bedtime: "Dear Jesus, please let the bin men come and collect our bins tomorrow." They came the next day.

Nobody's leg was healed. But God had intersected with a child's life in a way we could point to and say, that was him. We still remind our son of it.

This matters, because I sometimes hear that prayer is all about changing us. It does change us, but the testimony of the Bible is that prayer changes circumstances too. Elijah was a man just like us, and he prayed that it wouldn't rain. Jesus taught us to ask for God's kingdom to come and his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Our children should see that prayer is bigger than feeling better.

Three questions to ask this week

If you lead, teach or parent children, try these:

1. How would I know whether a child is praying at home? Are we asking, and listening to the answer?

2. Where do children in our group get to experience God for themselves, not just hear about him?

3. What would help a child feed themselves from the Bible in a year's time, once the session is over?

The goal was never a good session. It's a child who has begun to make their faith their own before the Lord.