Welcome back to Aspastor John. This summer Pastor John is out of the studio preaching in Belfast in Scotland before returning to the States for a 40-day writing leave to finish up a book on Providence on the sovereignty of God a book he started last summer and hopes to finish this summer I cannot wait to see it and all of it the travel the book writing in this very podcast is all made possible by you we are supported by the prayers and the funding of God's people so thank you for generously

investing in this important and eternal work so with Pastor John busy we're diving into our archive of 1500 episodes and this summer we're pulling out some of your favorites about once every 50 episodes we release one that touches a nerve and touches the 300,000 play mark these are the elite episodes in our six and a half year history we only have about 30 of them and here's one of them

Robert from Columbia South Carolina writes in to ask this Pastor John I'm wondering if there are situations in which a separate children's time in Sunday school rooms completely apart from the Sunday gathering aren't necessary our church is wrestling through the issue now as many families have infants some have wandering and noisy toddlers there are a bunch of five year olds and we also have three children of varying ages with special needs like autism and Down syndrome the struggle is

most parents want to break and thus desire the separate time for children while the adult service is going on yet the children workers wish they were in the adult service and feel limited in their ability to control the behavior of the children what should we as a church do well I hope there's a strong leader in your church because

weak leaders will never will never be able to stand up against the onslaught of criticism that's going to come if you try to do what I'm going to suggest oh my

when I came to Bethlehem as a pastor in 1980 one of the first issues to I had to deal with was about the children in worship and they all wanted to know we didn't have a lot of them but they were starting to come what are we going to do we're going to have children's

sermon in the middle little little three minute daily where the children walk to the front or we're going to have children's church and then they come back in maybe if they don't

disappear when they're 13 or what what are we going to do and Noel and I my wife we teamed up we haven't done this quite like this since we teamed up because we both

felt unbelievably strongly about this and we we staked our lives on it we teamed up and wrote a paper for our people

arguing that we not have children's church and that we not have a mini children's sermon in the service but that parents or other responsible adults if kids don't have Christian parents bring their children to the service after about four years old we

provided a nursery till then and eventually those nurseries I put it in quotes became very God focused and nurturing times to

help get little children oriented on God and ready to go with mom and dad to the big service that article that we wrote is isn't the

Desiring God website it's called the family together in God's presence and I'm going to quote from it but I'm going to leave off the very thing everybody wants to know namely

how to control kids and that's the part my wife wrote and so if what I say here is at least provocative enough to get your interest then go to the website and search for the article and read what my wife had to say about that but I think really the the big issue is concepts of worship and concepts of parenting and concepts of how things are transmitted to kids so let me just give a few thoughts from that article God centered

worship is supremely important in family life and in the life of the church we approached Sunday morning worship hour in my 33 years in the past with

tremendous seriousness and earnestness and expectancy and don't hear those words as contrary to joy think serious joy think deep joy we were and are a happy people at Bethlehem we tried to

banish however all that is flippant and trivial and chatty and chipper I just abominate chipper worship services not all services had this flavor Sunday morning we called the Mount of

Transfiguration meaning an awesome place of glory where you fall on your face almost speechless in the presence of God and Sunday evening or when's the evening or

whenever you do whatever else you do is the the the Mount of Olives which was the familiar spot where Jesus

probably lay down put his hand in his elbow and talk things over with his with his disciples that's

utterly crucial in the church as well we didn't have a children's sermon as part of the Sunday morning

service we believe that even though it might be fun for the kids in the long on it would weaken

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