Most churches minister to children in some way but too often they simply perpetuate what they have done for many years without questioning whether or not those approaches are effective in forming the faith of children. Spiritual formation during childhood is too important to simply perpetuate programs and hope for the best.
As church leaders we need a basic understanding of the inner workings of the developing child. If we do not understand those processes, such as their physical, mental, and moral development, we will not know whether or not our methods are contributing to the child’s spiritual growth.
The child’s moral reasoning, for example, is very different from the moral reasoning of adults. Often the focus of moral education in the church is on moral actions. We want children to do what is right, and we believe that will happen if we teach them what is right.
Researchers, however, have found that children who had religious education were no less likely to cheat, lie, or steal than were the children who had no moral instruction classes at all.
Developmental psychologists Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg discovered that the child’s moral reasoning develops in sequential stages. To understand why children act as they do and to know how to help them develop morally, we need to understand the way in which they think about moral questions at each stage.
Catherine Stonehouse, in Joining Children on the Spiritual Journey, noted the following:
We do children a disservice when we force them to accept certain behaviors as “very bad” before they are able to understand the moral issue that makes the action bad. To force the issue prematurely teaches children not to think or not to try to understand right and wrong but just to accept the word of the authority and to comply without question.
In other words, the goal is not to force children to behave in Sunday school. The goal is to help children learn to think morally. Parents and teachers need to engage children in discussions where we can help them identify actions that could be taken in a moral crisis and the consequences that might flow from the actions. We need to ask not only what is the right thing to do, but why it would be right.
Moral development is a much more dynamic process than simply lecturing from a workbook or awarding merits for good behavior. It will be more complicated and much more time consuming.
Unfortunately within the church there are countless parents and teachers who approach spiritual formation with the stereotypical “spare the rod, spoil the child” formula. Obviously there is a place for discipline, however, if children do not learn to think morally for themselves, they become adolescents who are at the mercy of whatever authority grasps their attention. And when there is no authority to tell them what to do, they will have no moral guidance whatsoever.
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