At Duke Divinity School, we believe that congregational worship and prayer are vital to children’s growth in faith, and with support from the Lilly Endowment, our research group of scholars, children’s ministry experts, and students is studying connections between worship and faith nurture. We are partnering with congregations—pastors, children’s leaders, parents, and children themselves—open to greater inclusion of young people in their worship assembly. We want to understand and to help congregations nurture children’s faith through their praise and prayers before God. 

Let the Children Come is rooted in the rhythms of life-giving repetition sufficiently powerful to create an alternative time and space where children may dwell imaginatively. We will engage children and the entire assembly in full participation by evoking their loves, sparking their wonder, building bridges to transcendence through beauty, and shaping their postures for faithful living through a lively embodied choreography. We will create engagement that is vivid, with all its gestures, artistry, and wonder performed at full stretch, thus “speaking” more than words can say.

What Congregations Gain Through this Partnership

Duke Divinity School provides a two-year supportive learning cohort in company with other leaders from a wide variety of congregations.

  • Teaching and reflection with experts in child development, theology, worship, and forming intergenerational communities
  • Strategies for implementing or strengthening child-friendly worship practices tailored to the congregational setting that are not “childish”
  • Shared research findings on how best to support children’s faith formation, including through congregational worship
  • Resources to help congregations sustain and build upon worship, fully inclusive of all generations
  • Cohorts are selected through a simple online application process

What Duke Divinity Hopes to Learn Through This Partnership 

We are exploring the factors that encourage or hinder children’s participation in communal worship, together with how they express and practice their faith. We will also examine leadership approaches that support their spiritual growth, the ways inclusion reshapes congregations, and how we might contribute to the broader dialogue on children’s full participation in worship. Duke Divinity School will gather frequent and ongoing data through cohort and congregation engagement and utilize its experience and expertise in curriculum development to create a variety of resources for children, children's ministers, pastors, worship leaders, and parents. 

Let the children come to me, and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.

Luke 18.16b-17