Imagine you are Ray Kroc. And you have this awesome idea for a new restaurant…a place where you will make hamburgers and fries and milk shakes and little chunks of chicken. And you will market it all to kids all over the world. And you’ll call it McDonalds.

Now…imagine…after selling literally billions of hamburgers to millions of people you decide to change your business model and begin to teach the children to whom you are marketing that hamburgers aren’t quite right for you. Hamburgers don’t quite meet their needs. Hamburgers are boring. They’re irrelevant. They should eat something else….like chicken sandwiches.

Predictably, you’d see those kids begin to go to your competitors who serve better chicken. And eventually, because you can’t stay open only selling coffee…you’d close.

I wonder…and I know this will come off as uncool and antiquated, but I wonder if we’re not doing that same thing with the way we provide children’s and youth programming in church.

Here’s what I mean: parents arrive at church, head to the children’s department, check their kids in at the kiosk, and then cruise to the coffee bar. The kids have a great time and certainly learn about Jesus. But there’s no exposure to the worship service.

Then the day comes when they move from the children’s department to the youth department. There they are taught and perhaps entertained. They get to talk about all the pressing issues of the day…about being a teenager in the modern world. Let me be clear…I haven’t been a teenager in decades and I truly wouldn’t want to be a teen today navigating the craziness we call our world. But once again, the teens hang in the youth department until they are old enough to get a job. And in the process they pretty much avoid ‘big church’ altogether.

What’s the outcome? Young adults are leaving the church in droves. It’s boring. It’s irrelevant. No wonder…they were never exposed to it as they grew.

As a church…we are teaching our kids the spiritual equivalent of Ray Kroc’s decision to stop selling hamburgers. By creating programs that segregate our kids we are teaching them NOT to attend church. Am I wrong?

I’m all for programs that help our kids go deeper in Christ. But keeping them insulated, isolated from the core of church content isn’t serving us well. And in time it will kill the church.

At GCC we’re beginning to have serious conversations about how to build services that will invite the children to worship and the youth to engage.

Let me be clear…its not about church survival. It;s totally about the spiritual future of our kids. It’s time for a change.