R. Scott Clark writes about the curious contemporary phenomenon by which children decide which church their families will attend.
Is it any wonder contemporary church is evaluated on its entertainment value and not on its faithfulness to truth?
Surely such families will also put their children in charge of making decisions of equivalent importance.
Over the years I watched a number of people come and go through the doors of the church. In our mobile, vagabond, anchorless time, people move from job to job, city to city, and church to church. Given the mobility of a culture, say in comparison with a generation ago when a person might work for one company in the same city and live in the same house for his entire life, people move around. So there were some who left the church because of job transfers. In fact, I had a stretch where more than a dozen families relocated because of job transfers over a two-year period. Most of the time I could understand the job relocation. The situation, for the life of me, that I simply have never understood were the families that left the church because their children were not happy.
I can remember sitting before a number of families over the years who would come to me, “Pastor, we really love the church and find the preaching to be edifying . . .” On the heels of such a statement, I could hear that the person’s breath was not finished and that there was a conjunction just around the corner, “but . . .” Once they let the conjunction drop, I knew it would be followed by an excuse for leaving the church, “Our children just aren’t happy here.” I was certainly concerned, so I would naturally ask the family about the specific nature of their children’s unhappiness to which I received the following explanation: “Our children find the Sunday School boring. Plus, we know at other churches there is children’s church, which we think will be much better for them. They also have many other programs and such.”
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