In defense of children's sermons

By David Heim

If you mention the topic of children’s sermons to most experts on worship and liturgy, you’re likely to get a sour face and a sorrowful shake of the head.

“They are an unwarranted interruption in the flow of the liturgy,” they’ll say.

“They inevitably degenerate into cutesiness or worse,” another might say. “Pastors can’t help exploiting kids’ naive responses in order to delight the adults.”

“Children’s sermons inevitably become an ecclesial version of ‘Kids say the darnedest things’—a little comic relief in the midst of the service.”

“Children’s sermons are an excuse for not making the rest of the service accessible to children.”

“Who says the music, ritual and the sermon are not accessible as they are? In their own way, children are taking it all in; they may seem bored, but they are growing year by year into grasping the liturgy and the sermon. So don’t try to dumb it down.”

Indeed, the experts have some awfully good ammunition when they go after children’s sermons.

The problem is: congregations seem to love them. You can see the people beam as the children come down the aisle to meet the pastor. Sometimes, if one is sitting in the chancel, looking back at the congregation, the glow of pride and love is almost tangible, as if there is some physical energy emanating from the congregants. The people seem to be thinking: What a marvelous bunch of kids. How did we get blessed with these little people? How can we help them?

OK, it is easy to get sentimental. But it seems to me that the energy and sentiment kids elicit is a good thing. In some congregations, that energy and sentiment may be one of the few healthy things going on. So why not try to do something with it in the course of the service?

Maybe the "doing something with it" helps defines the goal of a good children’s sermon—that is, make sure that the energy and sentiment everyone has toward children is turned toward the gospel, not focused on ourselves. I think it can be done. I think I've seen it done. Has anybody else?

Comments

[Shawn Coons]

The problem isn't with Children's Sermons its with the people that do them. I value the children's sermon because, like it or not, the rest of the service isn't designed to engage them. So it is wonderful to have a couple minutes that is about helping them to hear a simple story/lesson about God and the world.

The problem with the people doing children's sermons is that they feel they need to be clever or entertaining. They often have very little educational training so they have no clue what an age appropriate lesson would be. The person doing the children's sermon often thinks that if they have a goofy prop and then ask the children a couple questions (to which the adult already knows the answers) then that is enough.

If a children's sermon is approached as a time to have a genuine conversation with children around a simple lesson it is amazing what can happen.

I also get tired of having the adults tell me that they can't hear the children, so can I please have them speak into a microphone. I usually respond that it's OK because I can hear them and if the adult gets bored we can find them some crayons to draw with. :)

www.igeekrev.com

[Amy Frykholm]

During a period when I was very unhappy about churches in general, I was in a Methodist church in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The pastor in charge of the children's sermon that day--near Martin Luther King Day--told the children a story from his youth and then taught them, "We Shall Overcome." It was one of the most beautiful things I saw in a church during that time. What was beautiful about it was that the pastor shared something very genuine and very personal and yet accessible. He was trying to give the children a glimpse into a powerful cultural moment and while the potential for the sentimental was there, his method moved everyone beyond it.

[Andy]

Lots of people tell me that they sometimes learn more from the children's sermon (taught by our CE director) than from the main sermon (preached by myself or the senior pastor). It can be a good excuse to say things in a very simple way that everyone can understand.

[Elsa]

I believe in the Children's Sermon for similar reasons that Shawn infers. I don't think it's about placing blame -- but I do think that there is something very important about listening closely when Jesus says to let the children come.

I don't like Children's Sermons that are cute and I don't think that's what Jesus meant about inviting the children into the work of worship and learning. I believe that this time for children is the same purpose of the sermon itself. It's to engage in conversation with the people of God. My biggest pet peeve is when this message is watered down. Children have a lot to teach us about faith if we are brave enough to truly invite them to come.

[mel]

David Heim and the bloggers all make good points - I have probably "done" over 1000 children's sermons (we call it "Time with Young Christians") in the last 21 years and I love doing them! As was rightly mentioned, "using" the children to be cute or clever is totally inappropriate. I sit down with the children and my eyes never leave their faces - and, it is true that many adults learn from these lessons. If one is organized, memorizes the story, speaks with the children on their level, likes a challenge, loves kids, and has a simple theoloical point to offer - then this time should be a great worship experience for all. It is precious and priceless to me.

[jim]

In my experience it's the pastor or the person doing the sermon who 'say the darndest thing.' Not the kids...

Like the one time when I referred to Jesus as a being of light...what was that about? Or when I dumbly asked the kids during the 1st sunday of advent who we were waiting for on Dec 25th (As if I couldn't see that coming....santa claus!) Or when I had one person (we often have volunteers do the children's message) who made the exact opposite point I was planning on making in my own sermon.

As a parishioner without kids I used to think the children's sermon was a waste of time and an interruption, but as a pastor - still without kids of my own - you begin to appreciate the fact that there are actually kids in your congregation and this is your chance to have face to face time with them. Especially when the reality is that - in the mainline - you could very well be serving a church without any kids in it.

[Don Mayberry]

For us...we value the "children's time" which takes place after the invocation, introit and first hymn and just before the children leave for Sunday school because it allows the children to learn to be in church...to become familar with a bit of the service...to be seen by the adults and to have a brief moment to interact with me as the minister of the church. I freely admit that I often digress into cute and silly in order to engage the kids...and that I also exploit their cutness for the pleasure of the adults. However it is all done with gentleness and love and we...children, congregation and me...simply enjoy being together. I cannot help thinking that is something that is also pleasing to God. Lighten up a bit and enjoy.

[Elisabeth]

My problem with giving a children's sermon is that when I come to give the "main" sermon, I find I have said everything that really needs to be said in two minutes, the adults loved it and I wonder if I will accomplish any more by going on and pontificating on some arcane point, using big words like marmalade?

[Suzy]

I'm not convinced that we always must have a point, other than to worship — which is not quite the same as leading CE.

[Casey Taylor]

I hate doing children's sermons. Our cultural response to children in worship seems to go one of two ways (and sometimes both): entertain the children because worship is so boring, or get them the heck out of here so we can have some peace and quiet.

I've had two experiences that make me skeptical about all the parental complaints about unruly children in worship, of which I presently have two under the age of three.

First, when I was in college in the late 90's, I was part of a group of college students who led worship/assembly time for VBS. We thought the scripted songs stunk. So we just used popular praise and worship songs, adding in some movements. The kids loved it.

Second, after college my wife's sister, a single mom, and her three boys went to church with us. They lived near us and at one point even with us. We took them to our oddball liturgical Free Methodist church. We had hymns, four Scripture readings, a sermon, the Apostle's Creed, the Lord's Prayer and weekly Eucharist. I had what I still consider one of the greatest privileges of my life: teaching my three nephews the Apostle's Creed and Lord's Prayer week after week, in worship and out. When I heard these boys - all under the age of 10 - start to recite these words of worship from memory, I nearly wept. They still squirmed, but we refused them the noisy toys I see parents bring to worship. Eventually, they learned to sit still and join worship. Our congregation was welcoming of children and didn't get too bent out of shape about a noisy kid.

When Jesus said, "Let the children come," I don't think he meant, "Do a children's sermon." I think he intended his people to create a culture that welcomes the silliness of children while respecting them as persons. I'm still not convinced that looks like a children's sermon.

Casey Taylor
irregularchristian.blogspot.com

[Sarah Howell]

I have always been wary of children's sermons, but I had an interesting experience a few months ago that made me think.

While visiting a friend, I attended her church, a relatively small Methodist congregation. They have a children's sermon every Sunday and apparently everyone in the church absolutely loves delivering the children's sermon--there's a long waiting list just to be able to do it. The particular Sunday I was present, I listened to a late-middle-aged woman deliver a completely incoherent children's sermon that focused solely on the Canada goose.

Jesus was never mentioned. God played no part in her story. Even the environmental tack I think she was trying to take was weakly developed and unclear. Those kids probably walked away having no idea what was said.

But you know what? Any church in America should get down on its knees and thank God for a congregation like that, where the adults are literally lining up to be engaged with the children and youth of the church. The same can be said of a pastor who wants to be a tangible presence in the life of the children there and not just a "pontificating" figure in the pulpit.

Today I see many large, well-established churches suffer for want of youth volunteers and children's Sunday School teachers. If a children's sermon can discourage the sort of age-class silos that are shored up around the children and youth in our churches today, then I will happily listen to a children's sermon on geese if it shows that the adults are taking a genuine interest in the younger generation of believers.

[Dale]

I've appreciated the opportunity to read all of the comments posted and look forward to the ones that will follow.

I love children in worship - I love the noises they make, the questions they ask, and all the gifts they bring to worship. In the squirming, crying, and asking, they remind us that we are alive and often why we have even gathered in the first place. When we dedicate a child, we commit to care for her and to nurture faith in him. A child's presence in worship is both of those.

For our children's time, I often read a book to the children related to the texts for the day. Sandy Sasso has several that offer great pictures and good stories. There are countless others that work as well. Telling the stories, over and over again, works well. Sometimes I have trouble keeping the kids from crawling over my back or getting so close that other children can't see the book.

[Todd Hester]

I find it interesting that there seems to be line of demarcation between adults and children, as if the children's message has nothing to say for the adults and the sermon has nothing in it for the kids. My take tends to be that children's messages can, at their best, be like the first "Shrek" movie: Fun, clever, irreverent, approachable on multiple age levels, and possessing a meaningful message to everyone that pays attention.

The children's message can also be used successfully to affect the tenor of the worship service as a whole. I serve a graying Presbyterian church that says it wants to attract young families. On the first Sunday of this year, the kids and I, in the children's message, blew party favor horns as though it was New Year's Eve. We then read passages from Scripture that discuss shouting and singing and playing instruments and dancing as worship. The kids loved it, they learned something, and the prevailing adult notion of worship was challenged in (I think!) a healthy way. It sparked conversation about our service that is still in dialogue.

[Tripp Hudgin]

How timely!

I am leading a "workshop" for laypeople at my church for leading the "Children's Moment." It should be fun. What I am focusing on is inclusion...and not sentimentality. They love their kids. In a relatively small church, I'll have 10 people on Saturday for this training. They want to be involved. It's wonderful.

So, what I hope will happen is that we'll re-frame our sentimentality into "raising disciples." We are thinking of our own discipleship all the time as adults. Encouraging kids to think of themselves as disciples is something I think we would be good at.

So, more than sentimentality...more than "cute story with moral." That's what I'm after. We'll pray for our children, listing them by name. We'll talk about them, how they reveal God to us.

Keep us in your prayers.

[Laura]

I have mixed feelings about children's sermons. I love that children have a time that is planned just for them, especially since (in my experience) worship planners don't put a lot of thought into making services child-friendly. On the other hand, I don't like the implication that the rest of worship is not for them. I think children understand more through their senses than we realize, and it is in a child's nature to live well with some mystery.

I do give a children's message every week, and I have had many positive comments from adults. (We forget that adults appreciate visual aids and object lessons too!) I have some very precocious children who are often insightful and funny at the same time. When a child says something that amuses the adults, I talk over the laughter. My goal is to let the children know that I take seriously what they share and to let the adults know that the children's message is not for their entertainment.

[real live preacher]

Somehow children need to be included in worship. This gets harder for large churches with high liturgical expectations. But if that's the case, then they made it hard on themselves. Some energy needs to go into the question of children and inclusion.

Smaller church like mine have no trouble with this. I don't do a children's sermon, really. I spread out a blanket and the kids of the church come and sit with me. We chat a little. I ask questions and give hugs and other attention. We have our own offering bag which is used for special, socially oriented projects. We celebrate what they've done. And then we pray and they go back to their seats. I'm not miked, so the adults may or may not hear.

[Carol]

Our children's sermons attract mostly the preschool set plus a few kindergarteners or first graders. If the children are young like this, it is a fatal error to have a children's sermon that requires abstract thinking, as the typical object-lesson analogy does (God is like this balloon because....). Small children are still concrete thinkers. My former colleague did a children's sermon one Easter. He brought along a dried, mounted butterfly in a frame and spoke about the resurrection, new life, etc. until one kid raised her hand and pointed to the butterfly and said, "But it's dead!" Most religious language is symbolic and abstract--it's tough. So, I stick predominantly to Bible stories (without moralizing) or actions (take this rag and clean five people's shoes).

[Isabelle Sharon]

Who are experts on worship and liturgy, that you say are "likely to get a sour face and a sorrowful shake of the head"? It seems to me that the experts have written to you. If there are sour faced experts out there, please tell us who they are and why you think that they are experts.

[Jim Ketcham]

Great discussion! I remember telling one seminary student that all my best children's sermons seemed to teeter on the brink of chaos and my only job was to not push it over the edge!
I especially like the idea of having the children bring an offering that is taken during "their" time, since most churches I've served or belonged to took an offering long after the children had left. Why is it we are often so eager to get the kids out of the service once they've had this time? Small children (in my experience)love ritual and want to be heard and seen as participants in the worship life of the community.
I still like John Westerhoff's suggestion that the congregation provide a "quiet room" for all those adults who didn't like the noise children sometime make. He also suggested taking out the back row of pews and putting in several comfortable rocking chairs, with the idea that any adult could help out a parent by taking a child they knew (adopt a grandchild, anyone?)and sitting with them till they quieted - or right through the rest of the service.

[Kathy Winings]

It is encouraging to see a discussion of the children's sermon. I have long been a proponent of pastors doing a children's sermon. When I taught Homiletics, one of the 5 sermons that students had to do was a children's sermon. I have always found this particular type of sermon to be art. I absolutely agree that not every homiletician is skilled in children's sermons. A good children's sermon requires prayer, good preparation, and a great deal of thought as to who the audience is for that sermon. One pastor that I knew used to meet regularly with the CE Director and discuss the young children in terms of what was going on in Sunday School, the apparent needs of the children, etc. He said that it gave him a clearer understanding of their context so that his sermons would have meaning and relevance for them. Years ago, I even went to Vermont to hear "Bucky" Dann give a children's sermon as he was one of the best preachers of these sermons. The Children's Sermon is certainly well-worth the investment of time, spirit and heart that goes into a great sermon.

[Winne]

Children's sermons is a "Sunday Morning Performance" for "little people" and takes away from the worship service, one child told me. These children observe adults sitting and looking to see which child will "out-shine" the other. Some of the kids have said to me they feel that the congregation do not value them as part of the church and are only there for entertainment purposes.

As pastor, it takes lots of time for me to prepare 2 sermons every Sunday and sometimes 3 if I have an evening service. Considering the fact that it takes about 10-20 hours (classic text book) to prepare a sermon. That is an enermous demand upon a pastor considering other weekly pastoral duties. Preaching children's sermon is old school and we need to update our thinking and technologies to include children instead of excluding them and putting on a performance every Sunday.

[Veronica]

Whether or not the adults are entertained should be beside the point. The children's sermon is an opportunity to proclaim God's Word in a way that is easily accessible to the children. That's all -- and that should be everything.

[Hugh Tudor-Foley]

It should be about meeting cildren where they are. At communion I still manage to get on one knee to had the little christians the wafer. And I learned not to say "Can you say Amen?"
The response is a nodded head. So I say, "Say Amen."
THey are very literally minded - and they are us.

[Rev Fuddy Duddy]

Oh my, the children's sermon. As an intentional interim pastor I've encountered the expectation in UCC congregations of different traditions, some united or union churches withother denominational ties. Where did it come from? I suspect childrens sermons appeared when congregations realized they weren't teaching the children how to worship and they had lost the old connections with them. There are too few parents or other elders like Suzy above. When I've suggested other adults be uncles/aunts/grandparents to children in church I've gotten blank or rude stares.
I agree, the children's sermon is not for the adults. I'm still able to sit on the steps or floor. I sit low and face the children so my attention cannot be directed away from them and the congregation sees that the children are my focus at that time.
I've bombed at many children's sermons/times because I have no education about communicating with toddlers to pre-teens, and I have no personal experience raising children. It is usually last on my worship preparation list.
I am also guilty of planning worship and preparing sermons that do not engage children. Yet, like others, I've had many comments from people who've gotten more out of the children's sermon than the "real" sermon. Part of the children's sermon problem is in those sermons that fail to speak to the adults for whom they're written. Time for a homeletics overhaul.
Yes, we need to honor the children. I think the time and effort that goes into childrens sermons could do more if pastors and other adults that claim interest give children their time and attention in other ways. We pastors need to rouse ourselves and folks in the pews to ask God's guidance in pursuit of worship that engages all people.

[Lanny Howe]

Many years ago my father pastored a small Episcopal Summer Parish on the southern coast of Rhode Island. There were a number of grandparents and other elderly people who were regular attendees. Because they were grandparents and often owned marvelous summer homes, grandchildren of all ages came to visit. This was the age when if you visited someone you went to church with them, so in this little 100 seat chapel it was not unusual to have a half a dozen squirmy noisy chilren. One Sunday the front pew "blue hairs" were getting most upset with the low noise coming from behind them and began to turn and glare at the offending children and their parents.
At that point my father interrupted the liturgical flow of the service, walked down to the front pews and gently reminded those close to him and those elsewhere, that it was Jesus who loved the little children and who became upset with the disciples who tried to keep them away from him. "The children he loved," Dad said, "were noisy, and giggled at the wrong times, and twisted and squirmed, just like the children here today. If Jesus were physically in this room today, he would be sitting with the children, welcoming them and loving them. Why should we do any less".
That was fifty years ago and I have been a pastor for 26 of those years. My children's sermons are developed with struggle, but I know it is the time in the service when I am the most intentional about making the Grace of God the most real to those for whom Jesus had a special feeling. I too do not worry that the adults can not hear. If they can great. If not.....sit in the front pews for a change.

[Jim Henderson]

I am going through a difficult time in my life (including my "faith life.) In my 76 years of "being in the church" I have never felt such lack of support from the worship and liturgy that I participate in. I may be supersensitive, but most Sundays I feel left out. I have great empathy with children who need to feel that they belong and are accepted by "the church." But I feel that the children's sermon is a poor way to share that with children. For one thing, the ideas and language of most children's sermons I have heard are way beyond the child's capacity to understand. (I don't recall Jesus ever preaching a children's sermon.) We need to find ways of incorporating all ages into church, real sermons for those who need the intellectual and spiritual nourishment of the gospel, real participation for those whose capacity for understanding is limited by age, development, other problems of human growth. The artificial division of the generations in the context of church is, in my opinion, doing great harm. Let the little children, the youth, the young adult, the middle-aged, the elderly come. And let them be fed with that which is most useful and appropriate and needful for them.

[Steve Manskar]

I am convinced after many years of experience both giving children's sermons and having the misfortune to listen to countless others, that this is a 20th century invention that needs to go the way of the VHS tape.

At best the Children's sermon helps the children and the congregation experience God's love and justice. At worst they are simply inappropriate "comic relief" that interrupts the flow of the liturgy.

Children's sermons more often than not distract the congregatiom from the task of worship. They reinforce the notion that worship is all about them, that the purpose of worship is to give them a pleasant experience, to make them feel good about themselves, to feed them, to escape from the world for an hour. This, however, is not at all what worship is. The congregation is not the consumer, or audience, of worship. The members of the congregation are not to be there for themselves, they are there for God, to be in the presence of God who is holy and righteous. The purpose of worship is not entertainment it is sacrifice and giving of ourselves completely to the service of God.

The purpose of the liturgy is to keep the congregation focused upon God and to help them get out of themselves. Liturgy forms the character of the congregation and its members. When liturgy is planned and executed well it engages all the senses and involves the whole congregation, especially children.

My experience is that Children's sermons rarely contribute to the worship of God. It's time we put them to rest.