One of the big struggles with the current church online scenario is what to do with kids. Churches are struggling with it. In many ways the problem can be summarized this way…
Don’t try to digitize the past or the present. We need to invent the industry of tomorrow.
Erik Swedberg
The quote is actually from a Dassault webinar I watched, but the application is wide-ranging. Churches are asking how can we do kids ministry online the same way we used to. The answer…we can’t.
We can’t just approximate what we did physically for children in the digital space.
We may have to go “old school” and disciple and equip the parents to engage their kids.
We may all have to act as if the time of church programs that often acted as free (or discount) kid watching (and, yes, brought lots of people in and built relationships) is over.
Emily Flake wrote a piece titled, My Kid Sold Her Soul to Roblox: It’s my daughter’s main social outlet, and I’m not taking it away from her. In it we read a parent’s struggle with the current reality of living remotely.
This is not to argue against gathering physically (Flake certainly isn’t). It is to recognize that part of the church’s struggle with kids ministry in the current context is that we’re trying to do it the same way that we’ve been doing it for decades.
Here’s the question, though. If kids ministry has been so effective the way we’ve been doing it for the last few decades, then why has the percentage of identifying Christians continued to drop at an increasing rate?
Maybe COVID is our guilt-free way of pressing reset on church.
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