One of my toddlers insists on coming to church with me.

The church my family attends has a nursery that’s open throughout the service, but, increasingly often, one of my toddlers clings to me and says she wants to go to “big church.” I’m lucky enough to be home with my kids more than half the time, and to be honest, I had always found the hour of sitting still without them climbing all over me to be one of the most sacred parts of going to church during this phase of life. She’s a special kind of toddler, pulling the pews and hymnals and offering envelopes out, stabbing holes through the bulletin with a pen, standing on my lap, offering live commentary of the service in what can best be described as an “outside voice.”  

I will admit I often spend services alternating between giggling at her sweet antics and breaking a sweat trying to keep her from destroying church property, disrupting other church attendees, or letting loose a feral scream when I try to keep her from doing one of those first two things. 

There’s a profound irony in my discomfort, because for the last eighteen months (aka almost my children’s whole lives), I have been working with the Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church on a grant-funded initiative, called the Hatching Faith Cohorts, to empower congregations to engage kids in corporate worship settings, i.e. help them do the thing I so often don’t like doing as a parent. 

The project, funded by the Lilly Endowment’s Nurturing Children and Worship Initiative, creates cohorts of churches inside the Virginia Conference who undergo cultural assessment and change preparation (called the “nesting phase”), and then attend an kick-off event where experts demonstrate possible models for engaging children in worship, ending with an ideation session about what their church might be called to implement. They then spend the next year walking alongside a coach and their cohort as they implement their ideas for making worship more engaging for children (called the “hatching phase”). Once they have implemented their changes, they continue to look for ways to improve, expand, and build on their success, hopefully changing their community’s experience of children in worship in the process (called the “nurturing phase”).

The project had its kick-off event for the first cohort two weeks ago, and I had the delight of spending the weekend with our eight congregational teams (made up of pastoral leaders, volunteers, young children, and their caregivers) and some of the conference staff. Maybe its the parent in me, or the former youth pastor in me, but I’ll be honest, I’ve never had as much fun leading ideation games as I did with legos all over the floor and balloons flying through the air as seven year olds shouted out what they thought church should look like.

One of the experts that we brought in was a homiletics professor with a specialty in preaching to children – Dr. Dave Csinos. He, like all of our guest experts, spent the first 45 minutes demonstrating different ways of engaging children by actually engaging the children that were there, and then the next 45 explaining what he did and why, followed by some Q&A time. During the session, my friend, and fellow toddler mom, Hannah spoke up – what about toddlers? All of this with games and activities and interactive elements is great, but what should we do with our 2 and 3 year olds, who won’t sit in our laps, but who aren’t going to engage with a structured activity either. Should we just wait until they’re older to try? 

He took a beat before he responded. He explained that he has three kids four and under and that he gets it. He said, “Its pretty normal for me to only get two minutes of a sermon. But as a homiletics professor, I fundamentally believe that the act of preaching happens somewhere in between my words and listeners ears, that God speaks what God speaks.” Theologically, clearly we don’t believe that comprehension of every word spoken is necessary, or we wouldn’t have invited the kids in the first place. We believe that there is a sacredness in being in the space together that transcends whatever is gained by hearing all the words. He continued, 

“Maybe you only hear 2 minutes, but maybe that means it’s the 2 minutes the Holy Spirit needed you to hear.” 

At church this past Sunday, both of my toddlers decided they wanted to go to “big church,” and they opted not to leave for the nursery after the children’s moment, but to stay with my husband and I the whole time. It was chaos.

Our pastor spoke about Acts 10, and about Peter’s vision of the white sheet filled with “clean” and “unclean” animals. In his vision, an angel tells him to kill and eat all of the animals, and when Peter protests, saying he’s never eaten anything unclean, the angel tells him “do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” Peter awakes from the vision to find himself called to go to Gentiles and share their meals with them. When he tells the other disciples about his vision and his meeting afterwards, they are surprised and shocked, and Peter responds, 

“Who am I to hinder the work of God?” 

Our pastor preached about inclusion and widening the circle of grace… I think. My daughter, meanwhile, spilled apple juice on my church clothes, and poured an entire container of crayons on the ground. Stuck in the all-consuming mental and physical work of trying to keep a toddler from wreaking total havoc, I honestly wasn’t listening. 

But at one moment, as I watched as Violet tried to figure out how to put the pens back in their pew-back holders, I heard my pastor, and I mean heard him, as he said,

“Who are we to hinder the work of God?”

Clear as a bell, like a knife through butter, through the fog of overstimulating toddlers. It crystallized together. My kids acting like kids does not hinder the work of God. They do not hinder it to me, and they do not hinder it to the pews around me. Conversely, I do not hinder the work of God happening in them. I thought of our kick-off and the scripture we had all read together, 

“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” 

The Holy Spirit didn’t need two minutes. What I needed to hear that day came through perfectly clear in less than 10 words. So I will keep letting them choose how they spend their Sunday mornings; some days they’ll both want to go play with the other kids, some days they climb all over my lap, and that’s fine. We hinder them not. I’ll practice what I project manage, and be part of the great experiment.

Special thanks to our friends at the Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church – Hannah, Jennifer, and Dwayne, and to all the incredible experts, pastors, volunteers, parents, and children who have already taught me so much. I can’t wait to see what else we learn together.