I agree with the theory but am not very good at the practical application (same old story!). One thing we are trying is to attempt as a family to learn a Bible verse per week using the Topical Memory System from the Navigators (incidentally a great gift to give to any young couples you know – what better foundation on which to build a relationship?)

Here in Newtown Evangelical the church is together for the first twenty minutes, then split into “age appropriate classes” for teaching (aka Sunday School!). At the end of the “teaching time” everyone continues to meet for prayer – but the children have their own time of prayer in a separate room led by 3 christian couples on a rota basis. None of these children will pray if the whole church are together (apart from one ten year old boy) but given time with their peers, most will happily pray out aloud.

On a practical note, one thing that does help youngsters to tune in to an “adult” sermon is a sermon outline on a sheet of A4 paper with spaces to put their own notes in it – it also helps some of us “adults” to concentrate too!

One thing which does concern me is a fairly common view that “the maximum attention span of a child is only about 10 minutes”. This has come from a secular education viewpoint and I’m not convinced it is biblically accurate, certainly in terms of a child’s ability to be taught from the Bible. Conversly, there is no Biblical evidence that I’m aware of that says that a sermon must be at least “40 minutes to be a good ‘un!” The issue is not time, but content and quality of teaching.