Yesterday, I wrote about a simple, straightforward thing we can do to help with the discipleship of our kids. You can read that post here. TL:DR: Ask them about the sermon and (if they do the same passage) their Sunday School lessons. That was it.

A matter that underlies that one, though, is what our kids are able to take in. One argument I have heard for maintaining Sunday Schools during the service is that children are unable to engage properly with sermons. We need to offer them lessons that they can understand. I want to suggest this is essentially a bad argument for Sunday School.

Before I get into that, let me just say here that I am not against Sunday School at all. I think there are good arguments for having one and I am glad that our church offers these lessons for children who are best served that way. Indeed, I have made arguments in favour of keeping your Sunday School. However, I have also been clear that I think Sunday School primarily exists to help parents disciples their children more effectively (see here and here for example). But, just to be absolutely clear, I am not anti-Sunday School. I think tooled rightly they are a really helpful thing for the church.

My concern here is with this particular argument. Underlying it is an assumption that children can’t engage with an ordinary sermon. I just don’t think that is so. In our church, and to my knowledge nobody has forced this or even actively encouraged it in their children, many stay in our sermon rather than go out. Nor are they just sat there doodling and taking nothing in because many of them come up to me after my sermon and show me the notes they have taken – which are typically accurate – while others talk to me afterwards about what they understood and similarly seem to engage very well indeed.

I don’t doubt that some children may struggle with a sermon. That is, in part, why we have Sunday School at all. But I question that all children, or even most children, will struggle to engage with sermons. I think we just limit the capacity of children all the time and assume a level of incompetence that is not born out by reality. For children who struggle to engage – and there are a raft of reasons why that might be – we are glad to offer Sunday School. For children who would essentially stop their parents engaging with the Word because they are unable to listen attentively or constantly need to ask for help in understanding, Sunday School is there. but most don’t need it and their notes and comments after the service prove it is so. More to the point, their engagement with films that are hours long, and football matches and computer games and school work and assemblies and all sorts of things that involve a person standing up just talking to them for a bit tell me it is so.

The other thing I suspect is going on is that many of our sermons are just boring. We say that children can’t cope, but I suspect we are failing to recognise that many of the adults aren’t coping very well either. Sure, they’re not wriggling in their seats and shouting out that they’re bored because they’ve learnt that is socially unacceptable, but the idea that they aren’t thinking about other stuff in their head because we are deathly boring is just nonsense. It’s not just children who struggle with bad sermons, it’s all of us! Half the time, the children who say these things out loud are speaking for most of the room. It’s not that they’re bored because they’re children; it’s that they say out loud that they are bored because they’re children. We adults have learnt that’s just not a thing you say… at least, not out loud… out loud in front of everyone that is… ‘everyone’ being anyone who isn’t in your car on the way home… and certainly not while the preacher is still preaching.

The other factor at play, assuming our sermons aren’t so boring, is whether people are believers or not. Those people who actually love Jesus and expect God to speak to them through the pages of scripture are likely to be more attentive than those who don’t. That is as true for the children and it is for the adults. Even sub-par sermons can still be engaged with (I should know, people engage with mine all the time) when you think – even through this – God might have something to say to me. Children and adults who actually expect the Bible to have something to say to them, and the bloke at the front might be the person who will make it known, are likely to pay more attention. Those who aren’t believers, and who don’t expect God to speak and have little interest in hearing from him, these are the guys I expect to struggle.

So, can children engage with sermons? Of course they can. I don’t assume incapacity, but competence. What they struggle with – much like the rest of us – is boring sermons or a belief that God has nothing to say to them. Being boring may be our fault, but that will be a problem for everybody. A belief that God has nothing to say might be our fault in that we never apply the passage, and certainly never to the kids, so nobody has any sense that God’s Word has anything to say to them. But it equally might not be our fault. It may just be that they aren’t believers, and don’t expect God to speak, so they don’t bother listening. It’s the Holy Spirit that they need if that is going to be addressed, but it bears saying Sunday School and Youth Groups will run into that same problem if that is the issue at stake. But none of that is about capacity.