Answer:
Children’s ministry is exceptionally important. I can vouch for that first-hand. I first came to know Christ when I was a child, through the ministry of volunteers who taught the Bible in my school. As I’ve served on various ministry teams, I’ve had the joy of sharing the Bible with children. I’ve also had the privilege of working directly alongside vocational children’s ministers, and had a lot of fun in the process. I’ve seen first-hand how valuable children’s ministry is and how much of a difference it makes, not only to the lives of children themselves (including my own children), but also to the lives of their families (including to my own family as I was growing up), and in fact to the church family as a whole.
To do children’s ministry well, you need great theological depth. As I teach theological students at Moore College, one of the things I often highlight is that children’s ministers need exceptionally good theological training. Why is that? Well, when you’re teaching adults, it’s possible to get away with just regurgitating big words and technical stuff. Adults are polite, and they’ll often at least pretend they know what you’re talking about. But children won’t let you do that. To teach children, you need to understand your theology so well that you can boil it all down to a few simple points that children can process. You also need to understand the wider implications of that theology so well that you can lovingly and rightly apply it to their individual lives. Doing that properly takes great theological depth and skill. Now of course, the same is true in ministry to adults; and of course, it’s possible in children’s ministry to simplify things wrongly, and so teach in a way that’s highly accessible but still wrong. So really, we all need good theology. But still, children’s ministers—those whose task it is to take the great truths of the God of the universe and make them accessible for children—need especially good theological training to do their task well.
In this part of his letter to the Ephesians, Paul the apostle does children’s ministry. There’s a lot we can learn from Paul here, both about the gospel, and about the value and significance of children’s ministry itself:
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honour your father and mother”, which is the first commandment associated with the promise: “so that it may be well with you and you may have a long life on the earth.”
Ephesians and that is my summary why I should obey my parents.
