Why Your Kids Can Spend 600-Plus Hours
in Church and Not Get Much Out of It
By Natasha Crain
T
HE OTHER DAY I was reflecting on how much
time I spent in Sunday school and youth
groups growing up and how little I understood
about the Christian faith by the time I left home.
For some reason, I decided to calculate roughly how much
time that actually was.
I scratched out the following on a piece of paper:
• Kindergarten through 12th grade = 13 years (I went to
church from the time I was a baby, but I just wanted to
include the core learning years in my calculation.)
• 52 Sundays per year
• 90% attendance rate, to allow for illnesses or being out
of town
13 years of Sunday school x 52 Sundays per year x 90%
attendance rate = 608 hours
608 HOURS. And that’s not even counting the corre-
sponding worship services; that’s just the Christian educa-
tion time! I don’t know about you, but that number made
my jaw drop.
I spent more than 600 hours in church growing up, but
by the time I left home, here’s all I really understood about
Christianity: People go to heaven or hell depending on wheth-
er or not they believe in Jesus. Once you accept Jesus, you are
saved. Christians need to be as good as possible and not sin
just to be forgiven. It’s important to tell others about Jesus so
they can be saved too.
The result is that I lived the next 12 years with an incred-
ibly blah, shallow faith. I didn’t actually lose my faith—as
do more than two-thirds of kids who grow up going to
church—but it was only hanging by a thread.
Where did those 600-plus hours of Christian education go?
How can it be that so many kids spend this kind of time in
church and don’t leave home with much more understand-
ing of Christianity than could be taught in a week of church
camp? I think I know the answer.
THE PROBLEM OF UNCONNECTED PUZZLE PIECES
This is a problem of unconnected puzzle pieces. Over the
years that a child attends Sunday school, teachers, curric-
ula, and churches vary (as families move). Kids are handed
various pieces of Christianity during that time, which they
collect and store internally. But unless there is a consis-
12
tent, focused, goal-oriented spiritual trainer in their life—a
parent—those pieces will almost certainly lie around uncon-
nected. Here’s why.
1. Having a bunch of puzzle pieces doesn’t necessarily
mean you know what the completed puzzle is supposed
to look like.
Imagine someone handed you all the pieces to complete a
5,000-piece puzzle but didn’t give you the box top picture to
see how they all fit together. You would be able to connect
a few pieces here and there, but you would face a lot of
difficulties because you wouldn’t know what picture you’re
working toward.
Kids collect “puzzle pieces” of Christianity over the years
in Sunday school, usually in the form of individual Bible
stories. A piece might be the story of Moses at the burn-
ing bush, Joseph with his multicolored coat, or any of Jesus’
miracles. Most kids who have spent hundreds of hours at
church can describe these individual puzzle pieces quite
well. That’s not the problem.
The problem is they don’t know how those pieces fit togeth-
er into a meaningful, complete picture of salvation history.
In other words, why on earth should they care to learn that
God spoke to Moses in a burning bush? Could anything
seem more disconnected from a kid’s reality in the twen-
ty-first century? After my 600-plus hours in Sunday school,
I certainly couldn’t have explained the connection between
this event and the Exodus, why the Exodus mattered, what
that had to do with Jesus, and why that’s relevant to my faith
today. It was just an isolated piece of the puzzle of Christi-
anity. And isolated pieces do not join themselves together to
make a beautiful picture.
As parents, we can’t expect that the pieces our kids pick up
at church will fall into obvious places, even after 600-plus
hours. It is our responsibility, and our responsibility only, to
be the intentional hand that guides these pieces into place on a
bigger picture over time.
2. Having a bunch of puzzle pieces doesn’t necessarily
mean those pieces will create a picture with meaningful
complexity.
When kids first start doing puzzles, those puzzles usually
have just 12 giant pieces. They make a picture but a very
simple one—nothing like the artistic complexity of one with
1,000 pieces or more.