My husband and I moved eight times in the first seven years we were married. Our early marriage was marked by a kind of instability and precariousness that had been foreign to both of us before. Once we moved states so that my husband could work at a new job, which he ended up losing just nine months later. We were blindsided and reeling from grief and fear.
One night, a friend texted us that his five-year-old had prayed for our family at dinner. “He prayed that you’ll remember your baptisms,” the friend wrote. This memory still can move me to tears. We were so young and scared. We were feeling deep rejection from the community we had moved to join, and there were so many practical things to worry about: our three young daughters, groceries, a place to live, and new jobs. That five-year-old’s prayer was a gift. In the midst of some of the worst circumstances our family had yet faced, we were reminded of our belonging—to God and to God’s people. Our baptisms remind us that our belonging depends upon Jesus, not on our worthiness or our efforts. Though my husband and I were still very unsure of what our future would hold, we were reminded that we were, in a deep and unchanging way, beloved by God and a part of his family.
Belong
The first question of the Heidelberg Catechism asks, “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” The answer begins with belonging: “That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.” That we belong to Jesus is a foundational truth of Christian identity. In the Reformed tradition, because we believe that this belonging is not contingent on our behavior or even our consent, we baptize our infants, declaring with both our words and our actions what is true about them even before they are able to declare it for themselves. At their baptisms, we commit to helping children experience this belonging and to understand the gospel story, and we pray that they will choose to participate in God’s work in the world.
But how do we actually live these promises as a community? Whether or not we baptize our children as infants, how do we continue to communicate to the children in our churches this message of belonging? Are we sending mixed or confusing messages to the children in our churches about who belongs among the people of God, whom worship is for, and what a child’s place is among God’s people?
If we are honest, children are probably some of the last people we think about when we plan a worship service. In many churches, children are not even present for the worship service. However, there is not a single time in Scripture when God’s people worship God in age-segregated groups. When God’s people worship, they do it all together. In many churches today, instead of treating age segregation as a contextual consideration that we must navigate as the people of God, we often elevate it to a foundational position of our church (Holly Allen and Christine Lawton Ross, Intergenerational Christian Formation, 2012, p. 114.). To put it another way, we often assume age segregation based on our cultural position rather than allowing our theology to shape the way we gather to worship.
But if we believe that in worship God’s people gather to rehearse the story of Scripture and respond to the God who calls us to himself, then it makes sense that we would want children to be present with us. Who knows the language of story better than children, and what better way for them to learn a story than to live it—to experience it with all of their senses?
Yet even if children are present in our services, we rarely think about them when we plan our worship services, and the idea of having children help us plan or lead our worship services is completely foreign. We are not suggesting here that worship services be changed to be more appealing to children. We are instead suggesting that children can learn to appreciate a worship service and, even more, that it is the job of parents and churches to help them do so. Furthermore, because of the way God made them, children offer unique gifts to congregations that are willing to see, include, and learn from them as they rehearse God’s story together. When we age-segregate our worship services, well intentioned as we may be, there are consequences for every generation.
Planning Worship with Children in Mind
For some of us, imagining intergenerational worship is difficult. The idea of planning worship with children in mind seems gimmicky at best and downright chaotic at worst. But what if planning intergenerational worship isn’t about gimmicks or catering to different age groups, but instead about telling the gospel story and helping people find their place in it? We would want to think about what kinds of accommodations will help the people in our churches experience the story of the good news of the gospel and offer their response to God together.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that our liturgy will change. In my experience, children respond very well to a set liturgy that is predictable and has lots of parts they can memorize. Dr. Robbie Castleman has pointed out that for children who are exposed to worship from a young age, church becomes like a familiar bedtime story (Dr. Robbie Castleman, interview with Lindsey Goetz and Dr. Ahyuwani Akanet, The Child in Our Midst, May 6, 2024, pod.link/1738960877). What an image! Isn’t that what we want for everyone in our churches—to so identify with the flow and feel of worship that we can somehow both relax into familiar rhythms, remain poised for what is next, and just know when something gets skipped? If children aren’t experiencing the story of scripture in our worship, something has gone wrong. We ought to help everyone in the congregation enter into the story week after week.
This can be a daunting task. Many Christians admit to not reading the Bible regularly. The worship leader’s job is a big one. However, collaboration is key. Who are the people in your congregation who can help you consider the ways that people in different life stages and social locations will most naturally enter the gospel story? The idea for intergenerational worship is “something for everyone,” not “everything for everyone” (Sarah Bentley Allred, “An Introduction to Intergenerational Worship,” Intergenerate, May 24, 2021). We are formed as we worship, and a part of that formation is recognizing that we are gathered up among people who are different from us.
Belonging is also a vital part of worship, and it is important that the implicit messages we send as we gather to worship tell everyone that they belong and that they are beloved by God. Including people of different generations and abilities in worship planning can help us create worship services that authentically engage people of all ages. We can also think carefully about the scripture passages we choose, how we present them, the way our spaces are set up, and what the environment communicates. How are we showing hospitality to the people in our churches, both young and old?
Practical Suggestions
Special seasons of the church year are excellent times to experiment with intentionally intergenerational congregational and family worship. Certain seasons of the church year just feel different, and we can use that to our advantage. The colors of the church calendar, special symbols, and stories from the life of Jesus can fuel a child’s imagination. And some seasons are only a few weeks long, making experimentation a bit easier. We can put up with almost anything for four weeks! These seasons also offer us a chance to become like the children among us as we watch and learn from the wonder and awe they bring to these stories of salvation history.
During Advent, for example, a church might choose to focus on different characters in the Christmas story. At our church, we chose four narratives, in part because narratives are easier passages of scripture for children to connect with. These passages were assigned to the four weeks leading up to Christmas and were included in a guide for households worshiping at home. They also dovetailed with an intergenerational Sunday school class in which participants reflected on and engaged with the narratives in different ways each week. The idea is not for your church to replicate what happened at our church, but to imagine what it could look like for a group of people to collaborate—to include representatives from different age groups in the planning of worship and learning experiences. The synergy that can come from a group of people thinking ahead about sermon series, education, and household discipleship resources for a focused period of time can bear great fruit in the life of a church.
One of my favorite services of the church year is our church’s family Christmas Eve service. It’s a very light version of a Christmas pageant. There are no rehearsals and no lines. We sing short parts of several carols, and we hear the Christmas story. Throughout the service, children wearing very simple costumes picked up on their way into the sanctuary slowly walk to the chancel to create a living nativity. Sometimes I read the narration; sometimes older children in our church do it. In all the years I have read it, I have never made it through the story without crying. This service is chaotic, but the gospel never seems truer to me than when I’m reading that the congregation will “find Jesus in the streets, in their homes, and in their hurts and broken places” while I’m sharing the stage with the children I have come to love and worship with Sunday after Sunday. I’ve never felt more commissioned for weekly work than when the children process out of the sanctuary carrying the baby Jesus and charging us to “Go Tell It on the Mountain” or when the service ends with the words of Revelation 21 read in a booming voice: “I am making all things new.” Every year, these children help us remember the Christmas story in a truly authentic way.
Both of these examples are just the beginning of the fruitful worship that can occur when a group of people at a church collaborate to plan a season of the church year, intending to make their worship accessible to everyone in the congregation.