September 12, 2025

Children at Worship

This coming Sunday we will begin a new season in children’s worship at our church. After the children’s message, our children will process to the chapel behind the wall on the piano-side of our worship space. There they will continue to worship in parallel to the worship we will offer under the dome. Their offering will be a reflection of our worship in two ways.

1. We will follow the same structure. Almost all of our worship service follows this pattern: “We gather together, to hear God’s Word and to respond with our lives, in the places we now go.” Hopefully, this sentence is familiar to you all, as it is in our bulletin each Sunday. It is nothing less than a description of worship on the Lord’s Day for the earliest records to today—Gather, Word, Table (response), Dismissal. The children will leave in the middle of the liturgy of the Word, they will have their own reflection on the texts of the day, have their own response to the Word, and then be dismissed to return to their family and receive the benediction with us all.

2. The Children’s worship, like ours will be liturgical worship. Liturgical does not mean formal, traditional, or sacramental. Liturgy comes from the Greek words laos and ergia, which literally mean “people” and “work.” In the Greek the relationship is reversible, meaning “liturgy” is both the “work of the people” and the “work for the people.” For those in the chapel and for those under the dome, the people are the primary worshipers, worship is a verb, an action, an effort offered to God as praise and to the world as intercession—both in prayer and in service. Those who lead worship, are simply facilitating the prayers of God’s people in either location.

However, the children’s worship will be superior to ours, in one significant way. Children have an innate capacity for mystery, miracle, and magic. Their world is an enchanted world. The belief of a God, of a loving force which creates and sustains all that there is, is something we iron out of children. We make their world flat by ongoing analysis and explanation as we systemically, surgically remove the mystery of our world and life. They have no doubt that God is immediate to them hearing, seeing, welcoming every expression of love and worship they offer. Researchers have identified in children innate capacities for prayer, the metaphysical (or spiritual) world, and wonder and delight in what we consider ordinary.* They have much to teach us.

This new experiment in offering our children a more intentional opportunity to worship God in their own language is intended to be a lesson that will be learned and reinforced throughout their lifetime of worship. As a Chinese proverb states:

I hear and I forget.

I see and I remember.

I do and I understand.

Might we all pray that in our doing of worship (liturgy) we grow in understanding of God, and of our world and ourselves from God’s perspective.

And a little child shall lead them,

~ Pastor Lauren and Pastor Todd 

*See Sofia Cavalletti, The Religious Potential of the Child, especially Chapter 1.