This book is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism and review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without the express permission of the publisher.
A previous version of Chapter 4 first appeared in Beilharz T (2021), ‘Intergenerational church and sociocultural development’ in Seibel C (ed), Engage All Generations: A Strategic Toolkit for Creating Intergenerational Faith Communities, Abilene Christian University Press. Used by permission of Abilene Christian University Press.
All online materials referenced in this work were publicly available December 2024.
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Two distinct contributions make this book from Tim Beilharz a must-read for youth and children’s ministers. First, everything in the book is framed by biblical theology. Second, the discipleship strategies that Tim develops are enriched with developmental research without diminishing faithfulness to Scripture in any way. The result is a richly biblical and practical approach to forming the faith of the next generation.
Dr Timothy Paul Jones, Professor of Apologetics and Family Ministry at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, USA
If you love this quote, you’ll love this book: ‘As children’s ministry leaders, we can … teach and equip others to see the youngest brothers and sisters of their church as fellow members of Christ’s body—valuable members of the church today, not just in the future’. Tim has done the hard work for us, taking us on a journey through the historical factors that have shaped how we think about kids’ ministry today. Yet Tim’s commitment is to let the Bible have the final say. This book is a must-read as we think intentionally about discipling children in the context of the family, the age-specific kids’ church and the intergenerational context of the church community.
Sandy Galea, Founder and Director of Kidswise
You have in your hands a rare thing in children’s ministry—in fact, it’s unique. It’s a book that takes the Bible, the social sciences, the church, the family and the child seriously in equal measure. What Tim has done to balance these elements and place them in their proper place is crucial to undergird, equip and inspire children’s mission and ministry today. We needed this book.
Gareth Crispin, Lecturer in Practical Theology, Cliff College, UK
Instead of simply offering ‘how tos’ and then tagging on a Bible verse to justify his recommendations, Tim has offered a biblically rich and pastorally wise framework for Christians who want to call children into lifelong faith. I highly recommend The Child in God’s Church to ministry leaders who want to see the next generation become adults who serve the Lord.
Mike McGarry, Founder and Director of Youth Pastor Theologian; author of A Biblical Theology of Youth Ministry: Teenagers in the Life of the Church
The Child in God’s Church presents God’s beautiful vision for children in his church. Each chapter is theologically rich, robust and nuanced, accessible to pastors and parents, children’s ministry leaders and spiritual grandparents. Tim’s three-sphere framework is compelling and challenging. Rather than pursuing the latest strategy, the three spheres enable us to reflect theologically, practically and contextually in order to see children come to Christ and grow as lifelong disciples of our Saviour. Ed Springer, Senior Minister, Orange Evangelical Church Australia
The Child in God’s Church is a theologically deep and practically wise work that explores how children are not merely participants but essential contributors to church life. With a pastor’s heart and a scholar’s mind, Tim carefully draws together the threads of church, family and segmented ministries into a well-balanced and complete picture. This is a book for thoughtful church leaders as well as children’s ministers, and deserves to be read widely.
Dr Robin Barfield, Lecturer in Practical Theology, Oak Hill College, UK
A myriad of books on children’s ministry have been written, but often these books offer a siloed approach that separates the spheres of ministry, family and the people of God and results in a fractured approach, at best, to children’s discipleship. So many churches are realising the need for more integrated faith and discipleship for youth and children, but what does that really look like? Tim Beilharz’s The Child in God’s Church casts an imagination of how children can be valued, honoured, nurtured and discipled in church, all the while providing a biblical foundation and framework for children’s ministry, centred in holistic discipleship. And for Beilharz, this kind of holistic discipleship only takes place when we bring the spheres together, enabling age-specific ministry, family ministry and intergenerational ministry to converge— prioritising discipleship of the whole child in the midst of the whole church. This book is for the whole church—ministry leaders, parents and caregivers, all the people of God—and it will inform and enable the whole people of God to faithfully include, nurture and disciple the children in our midst.
Dr Valerie M Grissom, author of All Ages Becoming: Intergenerational Practice in the Formation of God’s People; Chair of the InterGenerate Team; Pastor in the Presbyterian Church (USA)
Today’s kids are starving for context and many are wondering: ‘What is real? Who can I trust?’ In The Child in God’s Church, Tim Beilharz provides a theologically rich exploration of children’s ministry, emphasising the importance of understanding the ‘why’ behind our practices. With biblical insights and practical guidance, he outlines a vision for discipling children that prioritises their spiritual formation within the church, family and community. This book is an essential read for anyone seeking to deepen their ministry to children and foster lasting faith in the next generation.
Matt Markins, President and CEO, Awana
Tim’s signature framework for interweaving children’s, family and intergenerational ministry ensures that this book will make a unique contribution to the field of faith formation. The biblically informed, theologically rich, socioculturally astute discussion he offers within these pages is sure to help practitioners learn best practices for nurturing faith in children and understand the theories on which these practices stand.
David M Csinos, Associate Professor of Practical Theology, Atlantic School of Theology; Founder of Faith Forward
The Child in God’s Church is an essential resource for church leaders seeking to understand and implement a comprehensive discipleship pathway for children. Tim masterfully integrates theological insights with practical applications, offering a robust framework that includes age-specialist ministry, family engagement and intergenerational relationships. By integrating specialised age-appropriate ministry with the broader, intergenerational life of the church, Beilharz offers a comprehensive and theologically sound pathway for nurturing the faith of the next generation. From Deuteronomy’s call for generational faith transmission to Jesus’ radical inclusion of children to the Pauline vision of the church as a body where every member, regardless of age, has a vital role to play, the book emphasises the scriptural imperative for churches to intentionally integrate children into the life of the congregation. The Child in God’s Church is a masterful blend of theological depth, scriptural fidelity and practical wisdom. By embracing the truths and accompanying principles outlined in this book, church leaders can create ministries where children are nurtured in their faith, fully integrated into the life of the church and equipped to grow in their knowledge, love and obedience to King Jesus.
Michael Handler, Chief Innovation Officer, Awana
Written primarily from and for a reformed, evangelical and Anglican context, The Child in God’s Church serves this space well. Drawing on a breadth of practical experience, theological reflection and academic engagement, it also speaks to the wider audience of those with a heart for seeing children and families flourishing together in faith. Articulating succinctly the foundation of and case for a more intergenerational approach to ministry, The Child in God’s Church is a valuable resource for those engaged in ministry with people of any age.
Chris Barnett, Intergenerational Ministry Consultant
The Child in God’s Church is a must-read for every minister, whether they work directly with children or not. This book will help you uphold the place of children in our church gatherings and intentionally shape communities that nurture the faith of children. It is so refreshing to find a book that holds the three spheres of ministry to children together and that helps us to see the relationship between them, as well as convicting us of the necessity and importance of church gatherings, age-specific children’s ministry programs and family discipleship for the faith formation of children. Too often as churches we fail to nurture more than one of these spheres, and it is time we invest in healthy, balanced ministry to children that intentionally nurtures children in our churches and at home. I’m so looking forward to seeing the impact of this book in our churches in the years to come, and in the lives of children across Sydney and the world.
Naomi de Vries, Assistant Pastor for Children and Families, The Bridge Church
To the children of Soul Revival Church. May you continue to grow in your knowledge, love and obedience to King Jesus.
FOREWORD
One of the privileges of living near the Australian coast is summer beach holidays, and one of my enduring childhood memories from these holidays is the pleasure of building sandcastles on the beach. I took great pride in building the largest, most detailed and multistorey sandcastle I could manage to sculpt out of the unruly and temperamental sand. I used buckets to form towers, spades to carve out parapets and arches, driftwood to support secret tunnels and passageways, and sticks and seaweed for poles, flags and fortifications! The building experience was always meaningful, formative and rewarding—but also temporal. Whether due to the wanton destruction of a malevolent sibling or the forces of nature and time, the sandcastle itself could only endure as a memory.
Over the years I have had the pleasure of many stimulating conversations with Tim Beilharz about the theology and practice of children’s ministry, the place of children in church, the responsibility parents and guardians have for discipleship, and the benefits and challenges of intergenerational ministry practice, to name a few. I know the students at Youthworks College have benefited from Tim’s classes and papers, and many children’s and youth ministers further afield have benefited through the advice and training he’s delivered with the Youthworks Ministry Support Team. All those conversations,
training sessions and experiences have been meaningful, formative and rewarding—but temporal. What we have needed and longed for is to have Tim’s thoughts and expertise composed into an orderly and coherent book. And this is the book!
I am grateful to God that Tim has formulated his wisdom, study and experience into this book and has managed to translate the warmth, generosity and epistemic humility of his personality onto these pages. Anyone who knows Tim knows that he is always thinking, wondering, considering and coalescing some broad range of interesting ideas. It is very ‘Tim’ to pull together insights from Vygotsky and Piaget with doctrines of church, salvation, sanctification and discipleship, all examined with Scripture and theology from Calvin, Packer and others. And he does all this with a firm commitment to his Anglican and reformed evangelical principles, yet also with an openness to other Christian faith traditions and perspectives.
The Child in God’s Church will give you direction and solid foundations for children’s ministry without being prescriptive, reductionist or vague. It will provide you with the knowledge and the tools—the bucket and spade, if you like—to build an effective children’s ministry that is both faithful and suits your context. This book will be a reference text for you to keep returning to as you evaluate, reflect on and seek to improve your own children’s ministry practices to further the honour of God’s name in the world. It will help you consider a couple of key questions: How are you being faithful to your theological foundations? How are you engaging children across the three interdependent spheres of child discipleship? May this book be a blessing to you and to God’s church for many generations.
—Mike Dicker, Principal of
Youthworks College
INTRODUCTION
In his popular book Start With Why, author and leadership guru Simon Sinek argues for the importance of an organisation knowing its foundational purpose for being.1 What an organisation does are the tangible products or services it provides. How an organisation produces those products or services distinguishes one organisation from another. Why describes the underlying purpose or beliefs an organisation holds to that shape—or at least ought to shape—both the how and the what. This book in your hands is my attempt to articulate the why of children’s ministry. I am interested in the theological foundations and theoretical principles that provide a way of thinking about children’s ministry from which our practice will flow. Children’s ministry that is faithful and effective is grounded in a proper understanding of who the child is and who the church is. A clear and compelling children’s ministry philosophy gives us our why and spurs us on to help these young disciples of Christ grow in their knowledge, love and obedience to King Jesus.
I have written this book for children’s ministers, church leaders, students of children’s ministry, and those in our churches who want to delve beneath the week-by-week pragmatics of a children’s ministry program to understand why we do what we do.
1 Sinek S (2009), Start With Why, Penguin.
This is not a book about children’s ministry practice. You will not find ten tips for group management, a failsafe method of recruiting more volunteers, or ideas for how to creatively teach a Bible story using puppets. There are already several books and resources that describe the what of children’s ministry—and as the children, families and volunteers at my church will tell you, puppetry is not my personal strength! In the second half of the book, I have attempted to explore and to put flesh on the bones of the spheres of discipleship by including patterns of practice, but even these are pointing in the direction of how rather than providing a comprehensive picture of what your children’s ministry should look like in your context.
Speaking of context, it is impossible to write a book on children’s ministry that does not rely, whether implicitly or explicitly, on the particularities of an author’s denominational and geographic background. I am an ordained minister in the Sydney Anglican Diocese. My theological tradition is reformed, evangelical and Anglican, and reflects these influences. Primary among these influences is the reformed principle of Scripture as the rule of faith. In the structure of each chapter, and the book as a whole, the Bible is the primary source of knowledge and wisdom. A theological formulation of children and church in accordance with God’s word must come before the knowledge and wisdom about children and church that we can discover from our observations of God’s world. Special revelation is prior to general revelation. The Scriptures affirm, while the social sciences confirm.
As Protestants, Anglicans share much in common with our other Protestant brothers and sisters. As it relates to children, Anglicans continue to baptise children and infants, a key marker of our theological understanding of children as members of the covenant community. As it relates to church, Anglicans place God’s word and the administration of the sacraments at the centre of our church gatherings. Both these commitments are assumed in this book. Where the reader’s theological commitments differ, I trust that our shared commitment to seeing children as disciples of Christ will provide the bridge to robust and mutually beneficial conversations about the role of the child in the church.
Finally, while I hope that this book is a blessing to many outside of Sydney and even Australia, I am praying that it may be valuable precisely because of the advantage of having a ‘Down Under’ perspective of children’s ministry. As a church worker used to translating the best children’s ministry publications from the US and UK into the Australian context, I hope the Aussie accent will be appreciated!
The foundations of children’s ministry
The first half of the book sets the theological and theoretical foundations for our understanding of children and the church:
· Chapter 1: the theolog y of the child and seeing children as developing human disciples of King Jesus
· Chapter 2: the theolog y of the church as God’s people gathered around his word
· Chapter 3: the theolog y of Christian faith as knowing, loving and obeying King Jesus
· Chapter 4: theoretical support from the social sciences for how Christian faith grows in community over time. How we conceive of children means that we will or will not take seriously their place in the local church. How we think of the purpose and activity of church impacts whether we think it matters how the local church relates to the child in its midst.
The structure of children’s ministry
Having established the theological and theoretical foundations for our understanding of children and God’s church, the second half of the book sets forth a framework for practising children’s ministry in the local church.
The dual responsibility to foster the faith of children and honour what God is doing among his gathered people provides three spheres of discipleship beneficial for child faith formation:
· Chapter 5: the child in the context of their peers and the children’s ministry that prioritises their developmental stage
· Chapter 6: the child in the context of their church community and the family ministry that prioritises the parents’ primary discipleship role
· Chapter 7: the child in the context of their church community and the intergenerational ministry that prioritises their place within the all-age, all-stage, gathered people of God. These spheres of discipleship are not in conflict with each other: they each reflect theological realities of who the child is with respect to God’s church. As church, family and children’s ministry leaders, we will be seeking to find ways that develop each of these spheres for each child. The order in which these three are presented is not intended to imply diminishing importance. Any sphere that is underdeveloped for a child will contribute to their failure to express key aspects of their identity as a developing disciple of King Jesus.
It is worth noting that these may not be the only spheres of discipleship for any specific child. The child who attends a Christian school or attends Special Religious Education (SRE/RI) classes in a government school will also have their faith formed in these environments.2
As children develop, it is also important that parents and church leaders be equipping the child to know how to read the Bible and pray to God as an expression of their faith. This personal sphere of discipleship between the child and God is also an essential aspect of faith formation. For our purposes, though, we will limit our discussion to the spheres of discipleship where the child interacts with the church. Finally, we must always keep at the forefront of our minds that the gospel is a message of grace. If my formulation of this children’s ministry philosophy is correct, and you are convicted that your current practices in children’s ministry need some realignment, don’t despair.
I became a children’s ministry leader at 15, a father to my own children at 26, and continue in both vocations to this day. Because of how seriously I take the discipleship of children, none of my frailties
2 In several states in Australia, Special Religious Education (SRE) or Religious Instruction (RI) is an educational subject taught, by committed members of a particular faith group, to students whose parents have permitted their children to attend. For many children, both from faith and non-faith households, these educational classes have faith-formative benefits.
and failings weigh more heavily on my conscience than the thought that I may have ‘stuffed up’ a child’s faith formation by failing to live out my convictions in these areas. What if I had taught more clearly? What if our family devotions were more regular? What if I was more intentional about our integration of children into the church?
But I am comforted by Paul’s words in Romans 7:25: ‘Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!’ Jesus’ death and resurrection has raised me from death to life regardless of my successes or failures in child discipleship. Jesus’ death and resurrection —and not any skill I may have—has raised from death to life all those children and young people whom I have had the privilege of discipling. I must constantly remember this: God cares far more about this child’s faith than I do, even on my best days.
My prayer for you is that this book’s paradigm will benefit your ministry to children by reflecting God’s truth about children and his church. By your taking seriously both children and the church, I pray that the children under your spiritual influence will grow in their knowledge, love and obedience to King Jesus more and more each day, until we all share in his glorious new creation.
PART ONE
The foundations of children’s ministry
Theological and theoretical principles for discipling children
THE THEOLOGY OF THE CHILD CHAPTER 1
As we develop our philosophy of the child in God’s church, we must begin by defining our terms. How we understand both ‘the child’ and ‘the church’ provides the foundation for everything that follows. Moreover, it is God’s affirmation of children and church, found in the special revelation of Scripture, that we will consider primary. Any principles of childhood or the church that are found in the general revelation of the social sciences are good and useful, but they are ultimately subject to our prior commitments to being students of God’s word and to transforming our minds in Christ. Therefore, the next two chapters will primarily focus on what we learn about the child and the church from Scripture, followed by a theological understanding of the Christian faith in Chapter 3, then the critical integration of social science literature in Chapter 4. Our theology of children begins in Genesis, with a theological anthropology grounded in humanity’s creation, fall, judgement and need for redemption. We then turn to the specific childishness of children and God’s good design for these young, vulnerable and developing humans. Finally, we see Jesus’ loving acceptance
of children, their age-appropriate discipleship, and their place in the covenant community of the local church.
1. Children are human
One of the first things to affirm about children is that they are human. This may appear self-evident, however this simple affirmation carries significant theological weight.
If children are human, then everything we affirm about humans in general is true of children. Humanness is not a developing characteristic. It is not most fully seen in adults, with children being humans-in-waiting. Children do develop in several important ways, which we will explore below. But humanness is an essential and inviolable aspect of every child, regardless of age or ability.
Image bearers
Genesis 1:27 affirms that God is the Creator and humans are his creatures made ‘in his own image’, a stimulating phrase with a long and varied interpretative history.
Old Testament scholar John Walton has argued that the creation account in Genesis 1–2 depicts the design and construction of a temple, a cosmic sacred space in which God rests with his creation.3 In Ancient Near Eastern religious systems, the end point of temple construction is the placing of the god’s image into the completed building. In this fashion, the writer of Genesis depicts God’s placing of Adam and Eve in the centre of the Garden of Eden as the ‘image’ or representation of himself. These first humans ‘image’ God into the created world. When creation looks upon humanity, when we look upon each other—including the children in our midst—we see God’s designated representation of himself.
The specific characteristics of God that we humans are to image into the created order continue to be debated among scholars. However, two aspects appear to be evident in the text of Genesis 1–2. Firstly, God specifically declares that ‘rule’ flows from being in his image (1:26). This rule includes a subduing of creation, which many commentators have
3 Walton JH (2009), The Lost World of Genesis One, IVP Academic. See also Walton JH (2015), The Lost World of Adam and Eve, IVP Academic; Imes C J (2023), Being God’s Image, IVP Academic.
