What We're Learning

What churches across our Area are discovering about children, worship, and belonging.

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Since November 2025, we have been listening across more than 60 congregations—through conversations with pastors, leaders, and parents.

From the beginning, we knew that listening to children would be essential to this work.

But we also recognized that the most meaningful listening would happen locally—in congregations, with people children know and trust.

So we began by asking:

  • How is intergenerational worship currently practiced?
  • What do leaders and families hope for?
  • What challenges are standing in the way?

This has not been a single stream of input, but a layered process of listening and discernment.

Listening to the Field by Independent Researchers

Through 29 listening sessions with 90+ pastors, leaders, and parents across more than 60 congregations, we began by asking:

What is happening now? What is possible? What is getting in the way?

From this shared listening:

Together, these perspectives revealed a consistent picture

What is strong

  • A shared theological conviction that children belong fully in worship
  • A deeply invested core of leaders and parents
  • A compelling vision of worship that is participatory, relational, and alive

What is challenging

  • Worship that is largely designed for adults
  • Children included symbolically but not meaningfully
  • Limited imagination for what intergenerational worship can look like
  • Cultural resistance, fatigue, and structural barriers

What is emerging

  • A longing for worship that is more embodied, interactive, and shared across generations
  • A growing recognition that this work is not cosmetic—it is cultural and theological

Future of Faith helped name this even more directly:

Intergenerational worship is not about children being present—it is about shared ownership of worship across generations.

Listening in Context

Ten congregations received the findings and wrestled with them. They asked:

  • What feels true in our context?
  • What stretches or challenges us?
  • Where do we see ourselves in this story?

Across these congregations, several things became clearer:

  • The gap between belief and practice is real.
  • The desire for change is strong—but so is uncertainty about how.
  • Many congregations are already experimenting, even if imperfectly.
  • The question is shifting from “Should we do this?” to “How do we actually become this?”

Most importantly, congregations began to see that intergenerational worship is not a program to implement, it is a culture to cultivate.

What We Are Beginning to Understand

Across all three layers—research, narrative analysis, and congregational reflection—a few core insights are emerging

1. Belonging is experienced, not assumed.

Children’s presence does not equal participation. Belonging is formed when children are known, engaged, and able to contribute.

2. Participation must be meaningful, not symbolic.

Many current practices offer visibility without influence.

3. Worship is often inaccessible to children.

Not because children lack capacity—but because worship is not designed with them in mind.

4. Adults are both the barrier and the bridge.

The same adults who long for change are navigating fear, habit, and limited models.

5. This work is cultural, not cosmetic.

It requires reimagining—not just adding children into existing structures.

The Critical Gap in Our Listening

Up to this point, most of what we have learned has been interpreted through adult voices.

Even when we are speaking about children, we are often:

  • Observing them
  • Interpreting them
  • Designing for them

But not yet listening directly to them across the area.

The Next Phase: Listening With Children

This is not a pivot—it is the natural next step.

In the coming months, we will:

  1. Equip congregations to listen directly to children. Not as a research exercise, but as a formational practice.
  2. Invite children to share their experience of worship; in their own words, expressions, and perspectives.
  3. Launch a broader survey to understand patterns across the Episcopal Area.

This reflects an important learning from the first phase: the most meaningful and sustainable listening happens when congregations learn to listen to their own children.

Take a simple next step by capturing the voices of children (ages 3–12) in your congregation and help us learn together across our conferences. It’s easy to get started, and it’s a meaningful way to begin growing in faith together. 

Click here to submit your video(s) or scan the QR code - no app or downloads required.


Selected videos submitted before May 6 may be featured at Annual Conference and before June 15 at the Intergenerational Worship Summit on June 27. 

At the heart of this work is a simple conviction:

When we listen to children—and create space for them to shape worship—we are not just improving an experience.

We are becoming a different kind of church.

A church where faith grows deeper,
community grows wider,
and generations grow together in love.

 

 

Growing Together in Faith is a movement across the Baltimore-Washington Conference of The United Methodist Church and Peninsula-Delaware Conference of The United Methodist Church Area, nurturing faith and belonging across generations through worship. Made possible through the generosity of the Lilly Endowment.