An amazing thing happens in Revelation. The church gathers as one people in the presence of the One True God - perhaps for the only time in history there is no segregation. What do you suppose God did with the kids? Maybe there are other possibilities but my brain says, where else would they be but with everyone else in the presence of God.
Yet, having said that, is there a time for separate worship? Maybe. Is there a time for separate teaching? Probably. If you're part of a church with kids who keep their firey faith through adolescence and well into adulthood, should you change something? Probably not. But I'd venture you're doing a whole lot more than just including your kids in your worship service. Maybe you don't even include your kids in the adult worship. What are you doing that makes your kids want to be connected and stay connected to the Living God? Isn't that what it's all about?
Are we looking for ways to do things together or are we looking for ways to divide? Are we sharing what we have in common or focusing on our differences? Maybe there's a time and a place for both but the bottom line is that we need one another especially when we're different.
I care about including children as much as we can, but I care more that we consider one another. Do we care if the music is too loud for someone, or do we send them away to a quiet church because we didn't need them anyway. Do we care about the people who don't have families and want a quiet orderly service? We need them and they need us. Do we care about the people who don't want the kids around? They need us and believe it or not, we need them. Do we care about the people who hate kids? Are we looking for ways to build bridges? Are we fueling reconciliation or are we helping to drive the wedge deeper. And do our attempts to include kids just reenforce and support the claims that the kids are disruptive? What are we going to do with that? It's not the "us" and "them" that matters here it's the fact that we need each other and we need to care for and love one another and consider each other and figure out how to be a faith community that God can be proud of.
You can't please all the people all the time. You can't please any one person all the time and Jesus didn't do that. He had a purpose. He didn't waver. But in the end He laid His life down both for His friends and for the people who hated Him. He laid it all down to come here. He laid it all down when He left.
Yet the life that He represented never really died.
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