Why should the kids at my church care about pursuing God?

The fun part of my job in children’s ministry is the kid stuff. The Lego towers and Magna-Tile castles; the art projects that leave our children’s chapel looking like a tornado blew through it. Telling the children my favorite Bible stories, helping them make Advent wreaths, and hiding hundreds of candy-filled eggs for them on Easter morning.

The much harder part of the job is stepping back and wrestling with some big-picture questions. Why do parents struggle to get their children to church? What case can I make for Christianity at a time when kids have so many appealing alternatives? Why should young people commit themselves to spiritual things when their wider community views such commitments as quaint, obsolete, and even regressive?

When I was growing up, I never heard anyone ask these questions. The culture that raised me was so tightly religious, so uniform in its beliefs, and so self-reinforcing that there was no need to ask why we did what we did. We went to church on Sunday mornings because that’s what Sunday mornings were for. We professed faith in God because God was self-evidently real. We pursued spiritual things because the very health of our souls was at stake in the pursuit. Religion was no joke—we had eternal destinies to secure.