Children's Sermons: Valid as Worship Education?

Here’s a question for you: did children’s sermons do you any good when you were a child?

You know, the times when the pastor asked for “all the children to come forward,” and you all sat on the steps in front of the lectern, and the pastor crouched down too and spoke in an unusually mild and just plain unusual voice for several minutes.

I’m not asking about whether they do you good now, as an adult. In fact, children’s sermons seem entirely oriented toward the adults as they put on display “cute” answers blown into the microphone and the cute children themselves padding down the aisle and then wandering about the platform during their sermon. Who hasn’t giggled at the prim child who keeps raising her hand and the stagey child who keeps waving to his parents? Who hasn't experienced a thrill of righteous indignation against the particularly wayward child or its parents? I have enjoyed many children’s sermons as the best entertainment of the service. But do they meet any child’s spiritual needs?

My childhood was filled with object lessons from the children’s sermons. I remember sand pails and shovels, teddy bears and broken dolls, photographs of family members, paper hearts, paper shamrocks, rocks of many sizes, candy canes, doughnut holes, closed paper bags and empty paper bags—in fact, all the objects but none of the lessons. The moral of the lessons, based on my observations of children’s sermons as an adult, was something like “God loves you” or “Obey your parents” or “Be nice to each other” but was never presented meaningfully enough to sink in or change my behavior.

Mind you, these memories include many pastors and many denominations, too, whether my parents’ or people’s we were visiting—Christian Reformed, Covenant, Presbyterian (U.S.A. and Church in America), Baptist (American and Southern), Lutheran (Evangelical and Missouri Synod), Evangelical Free, non-denominational, Nazarene.

These lessons had three effects on me: (1) they intensified my smug sense of self-importance because I usually knew exactly where the pastor was heading and, if not, "Jesus" was a safe bet for an answer (I was the prim child); (2) they made me long to be dismissed to Sunday school; (3) they induced either a general sense of good will toward the pastor, if he produced doughnut holes or candy from the paper bag at the end of the lesson, or a general sense of resentment toward the pastor, if he did not.

What I really remember are all the Bible stories from Sunday school and every one of the songs from the Sunday school and the adult services. I can still remember the story of Zacchaeus and the accompanying song (“Zacchaeus, YOU COME DOWN, for I’m coming to your house today”), the story of Peter’s calling (“I will make you fishers of men, if you follow Me”), the lame men being healed in the temple (“Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I you; in the Name of Jesus Christ the Lord, in Jesus’ name, rise up and walk!”), and all the grown-up songs that I had to stand on the pew to sing out of my mother’s hymnal: “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” “Holy, Holy, Holy,” “When Peace Like a River.” These songs and stories have stayed with me and enriched my life over the years far more than the object lessons and little talks with pastor up at the front of the church.

I believe that most of these pastors are of good will. I’m not accusing them of dismissing children’s needs when they struggle to create their “edifying” chats, but does anybody remember what it was like to be a child when they are crafting those dread object lessons? Has anybody surveyed children WHEN THEY ARE GROWN UP to see if the children's sermons stuck with them, or is the phenomenon of the children's sermon based merely on good intentions and the theory that children will remember an abstract moral message if it is linked to a concrete visual?

I have come to a decision; as an adult, I can make this difficult sacrifice: I could give up the weekly entertainment if it would free the children for Sunday school and singing.