Spirituality of children is often unnoticed

For the first meeting of the Southwest Texas Conference General Conference delegation, members were paired and asked to tell each other about when we accepted Christ for ourselves and when we were baptized. At the meeting, we introduced each other by telling the stories we had heard.
This process was in keeping with our conference theme of sharing our faith stories, and it was a great beginning for our group.
Our delegation represents many generations. I think we have someone in the age group of every decade from teens to seventies. One common thread I noticed in many faith stories was that the majority of us had come to faith in Christ for the first time as children or youths. I celebrated this common thread until, in my own mind, I made the connection to the lack of attention in many of our churches to any kind of ministries to children and youths.
I accepted Christ and was baptized in another denomination when I was 9 years old. A revival preacher came to our church and spoke first in a Sunday school assembly. I was on the front row, and apparently he noticed that tears rolled down my cheeks in response to something he said. In the worship service, he mentioned that a young girl had responded in the assembly, and I told my mother sitting next to me that I was that young girl. We talked to the pastor later, and my mother and I were baptized together the following Sunday.
My favorite story from the 2006 charge conferences was about Garnett, who attends St. Luke’s UMC. When Garnett was about 6, she and her mother were driving away from H-E-B when Garnett spotted the spire at St. Luke’s. She asked what that was, and her mother told her it belonged to a church. Garnett said she wanted to go to that church. The next Sunday, her mother dropped her off there, and for many years now, Garnett has been dropped off every Sunday so she could participate in the church’s life.
Lauren Dietz told me about Garnett. She explained that Garnett was assigned to be her God friend and sits with Lauren in worship. When Lauren was a child, her father always gave her a dollar bill folded into fourths to put into the offering plate. Lauren did as her father did for Garnett, so her little God friend could learn about the offering. Eventually, Garnett insisted on bringing her own dollar bill to offer God each Sunday morning.
The spirituality of children is strong and is often dismissed by families and by churches. Children long as adults do to be connected to God and to community. They teach adults so much by their questions, by their faithfulness, by their acts of charity. Isn’t that why Christ insisted on including children in his own healing and teaching ministries and warned his followers that we had better include them, too?
At the delegation meeting, it struck me that if we remain in denial about the importance of reaching out always and everywhere to children and youths, we deserve to reap what we sow.