Have you seen what’s going on upstairs in our Education Wing? Lots of volunteers of all ages have been painting, spackling, hammering, sawing and otherwise just making a wonderful mess upstairs, all to transform an unused room into a delightful place for Children’s Church.
It’s called The Treehouse (a name chosen purposely to dovetail with the Youth Group’s theme of Roots), and the idea is to make it into a place kids can walk into and think: “Hey! This is really cool!” We want them to have a great time in Children’s Church. We want them to like it, and to have fun. (Wouldn’t it be great if kids really wanted to come to church?) And in the midst of all the fun, we want to make sure that they are hearing the Gospel of Jesus in a way that they can understand and respond to.
There’s always some who raise objections to presenting the Gospel to children. But research has shown over and over again that most conversions happen when a person is younger. Every decade a person lives, the liklihood of them becoming a Christian diminishes drastically.
And we are commanded in the Bible specifically to teach our children. God said we were to take His Words and “teach them diligently to your children.” (Deut. 6:6,7) And the Lord Jesus Himself said, “Let the little children come to Me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of Heaven.” (Matt. 19:14)
Do you know who Henrietta Mears was? She was the Christian Education Director at the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, California (not a place you associate with church or Sunday School!). She began her ministry there in the 1930s (during the Great Depression: not a good time for our country, economically). At that time 60% of the children were not attending church of any sort. And less than 15% of the children who attended Sunday School ever made a decision to follow Christ. Young people in their college years were walking away from the church, and church attendance across the U. S. was experiencing a decline. (Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?)
But Henrietta Mears had a burden for children, and a vision for what their children’s ministry could do. She liked to say, “There is no magic in small plans.” She worked with the people of First Presbyterian Church to revitalize their children’s ministry. Unbelievably, their Sunday School grew from 450 to over 4000 in just 3 years!
Sometimes I think God does things like that in especially hard times and hard places to remind the rest of us that He is still at work in the world, and we can reach more people with the Gospel than we’re reaching right now. Henrietta Mears said that if God could work in Hollywood, then He can certainly work in other places, too.
Henrietta Mears wrote an entire curriculum for their Sunday School. There began to be a demand for it, so in 1933 the Gospel Light Publishing Company was founded, to make the curriculum available to other churches.
She also taught a young people’s Sunday School class in the church, and under her teaching many young men surrendered to go into the Gospel ministry, including: Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, and Richard Halverson, who became Chaplain of the United States Senate.
Now the point is not to say, “We have to be running 4000 in Sunday School in 3 years!” (If that would happen, our entire Trustee Board would resign simultaneously.) Sometimes stories like Henrietta Mears’ can be discouraging instead of encouraging.
The point is this: we are probably thinking too small, not believing God enough, and not really seeing the crying spiritual need of the children in our community. Of course we won’t run 4000 in Sunday School. There’s only 6000 people in our town! But I bet we could reach more children – and their families – than we are right now.
So pray for the new Treehouse Children’s Church. And maybe see if there’s something you could do to help. At the very least, don’t pooh-pooh it. That puts you in the same company as Sanballat and Tobiah, who kept telling Nehemiah that he couldn’t rebuild the wall of Jerusalem ( Nehemiah 4:1-14 and Nehemiah 6:1-14…besides, if you do pooh-pooh, we’ll pray you get the itch.)
And let’s have a hand for the Board of Christian Education, the Board of Trustees, and all the volunteers that have caught the vision and have been working to somehow make it a reality (even with a forbidding budget and people who can tell them all the reasons it won’t work). And she wouldn’t want me to say this, but let’s be grateful to God for Mrs. Shaye Place, who first had the burden to do more in our children’s ministries, and who kept lovingly pestering the rest of us until we finally gave in and said “Okay!” (Just don’t call her Henrietta!)
God Bless!
Pastor David