A good friend of ours recently shared a story about his eleven-year old son. Their family attends a fairly large, conservative evangelical church. Our friend and his wife are serious about their responsibility to disciple their children to follow Jesus and don’t hesitate to dialogue with him about difficult issues. One of the youth and children’s workers at their church had recently told our friend that it was really hard to get the kids’ attention at church, particularly the kids who had grown up in church and whose parents were always in church. Given the fact that his son was in that same group of kids he thought he might have some opinions about it. So, he asked his son while driving in the car one day.
“I hear that many of the kids don’t really listen that much at church and your teacher has a hard time keeping their attention. Why do you think that is?”
The response stunned him. After a few seconds of quiet, his son responded:
“Well, Dad, the main thing they teach us in church is that church is to have fun. They really ought to be tougher on us.”
Think about your church and its children’s program. Does it focus more on having fun than it does on making disciples of Jesus? The two are not mutually exclusive, but we must not put our focus on the wrong target. Is church all about having fun?