The van pulls into the church parking lot, and the family spills out. Waking up and getting ready on time was a challenge, but the family is gathered and expectant. Both the kids and their parents are now ready to greet various friends, find some coffee, and eventually make their way toward their usual seats. But it is here that a vitally important question should arise for every parent in such a situation: what do your kids need church to be? Because it may not be what you would think.
This question is not fundamentally about preference, or pageantry, or vibes and aesthetics for their own sake. Rather, we need to truly understand that our children need church to be something far more than just a fun place, or a welcoming environment, or even a learning center. They need it to be different. In fact, they need it to be strange—something so distinct and so different from their everyday experiences that they pause, and reflect, and ask vitally important questions.
A fitting example of this occurs in the saga of Joshua, where God miraculously leads His people across the Jordan river and into the land of Canaan. As the crossing is made, the people make a memorial to the Lord, and they do so with a specific purpose in mind: the memorial was built so that when their children asked them “what do those stones mean to you?”, they could tell them about the mighty deliverance of the Lord their God (Josh 4:6-8). And that purpose was not just intended for their immediate generation, it was for the generations to come as well. When the children of their future generations would come along and ask these same questions, their fathers in turn could likewise tell them of the Lord’s glorious works (4:21-24). The result would be that their children and children’s children would fear the Lord their God, and also that all the nations of the world would know the might and power of the Lord (4:24). Their worship was not strange for its own sake—it was different for a reason.
Within the American Christian church, we run the risk that many our children will never have cause to ask such questions because there is astonishingly little that will look strange to them. Our children may never hear the loud singing of robust songs that seems so markedly different from the songs of the world, such that they might ask why we sing. They may never participate in the congregational confessions of the historic creeds and confessions of our ancient faith, and as a result they may never have cause to ask “why.” They may never stand shoulder to shoulder with multiple generations of Christians within the same pews as they participate in worship and have cause to wonder why our worship is so different, so necessarily strange.
This all-too-common dynamic rarely happens by chance or accident. Christians often worship in the mundane ways that we do precisely because we don’t want our worship to be strange. Particularly over the past few generations, Christians have increasingly designed their worship services to resemble other settings—such as those we find in our jobs, education, or entertainment—rather than anything distinctively or peculiarly holy. Rather than hope that our children will ask why we worship in such distinct ways, we instead want our children to be entertained by things that might retain their attention. Or perhaps we want them to experience emotions through a form of worship that is stylistically familiar to them. Or we may even hope that they learn something new and interesting. In most cases, many Christians generally count our worship as successful and effective if we feel comfortable and find encouragement in some form—and hopefully the whole affair does not take too long.
The result is that many Christian children grow up and never find the need to ask the question “why.” There is nothing that appears strange to them, nothing that is peculiar or unusual about our worship, nothing that inspires and stirs our deepest passions. There is no sense of awe or recognition of the divine. Our children enter into the worship service and find that it looks and sounds quite like things they experience elsewhere. There is no real need for them to ask why we worship, nor what our worship means.
It should be little surprise that many Christian children see very little in our worship that inspires and sustains them in their formative years, which is a trend that has particularly disastrous results as they enter into adulthood. There is great biblical precedence for the covenant worship of God’s people to inspire a consistent question: whether it is seen in the celebration of Passover (Exod 12:26ff) or the recitation of the Law (Deut 6:20ff), the worship of the people was-and-is meant to lead to the question “what is the meaning of this?” God has designed this dynamic to remind our children that there is something more to worship than the new and novel things, something deeper than the things that might tantalize but will never sustain. There is something cosmic and genuine that occurs in the worship of God’s people, something that entails true spiritual weight. On the other hand, there is a hollow quality to so much of the trendy and popular worship of our day, and it is never more noticeable than when our children encounter the biblical worship that is old, powerful, and holy. There is power in encountering something different.
The strangeness of Christian worship is not a marketing tactic—it is because true worship must be different. Christian worship is the earthly extension of a heavenly throne room, a place where the thrice-holy God makes His presence to viscerally dwell, a place where the Creator’s unbounded light powerfully shines into the murky black darkness of this world. It is a place that we are taught how to worship, learn how to worship, and participate in worship that is substantively different. This is where we encourage our children to participate in something ancient, something that is set-apart, something that inspires the awe of God. It’s far more than simply “going to church,” it is building the sort of covenant memorial so that when the generations after us hear the cries of praise and confessions of their ancient faith, they would ask who is this God? And then, our children can hear the powerful words that account for God’s wondrous works.
