why I'd rather go to "little church"

This last week, I enjoyed the service at our church. The music sounded great. The sermon was a bit scattered, but it was peppered with humor and had some interesting concepts. There was the awkward, "walk around and greet people you don't know so that you can engage in shallow small talk just long enough to feel like a politician with a saccharine smile." I hate that part. My fake smile is large and goofy, like John Edwards.

I'd rather have Joel's schedule for Sunday School.

• Play - I would love free time to build something really cool with legos. I'm not a crazy lego geek, but given a chance, they are addicting.


• Music - like Joel's class, I would love to have two people with an acoustic guitar. I've just always loved this approach to worship.


• Play outside . . . okay, I could skip this part.


• Discuss a Bible story in a small group (although I would prefer to ditch the flannel graph)


• Snack - and unlike Big Church, they get more than a little piece of bread and a mini shot glass of juice


• Craft - Why can't church do a better job of incorporating art into things like worship and Bible Study?


• Play

I know the pace might be a little frenetic, but Joel rarely seems to be bored. Yet, he can still tell me (sometimes) what he learned in church. I actually have a theory about why little church works so well. It was created with a child's stage of development in mind. In other words, they decided to tailor it to the social and developmental context of a three year old. Many of the Sunday school teachers are elementary education teachers and they seem to know how to make it work for that age group.

The problem with Big Church is that they continue to use an old model for their services - one based upon a time when America was a print culture rather than a visual and digital culture. Sure, they have added PowerPoint, but there has been little dialogue about changing the actual method and format of the service to stay relevant in the current social context.

Moreover, from a teacher's standpoint, most churches could use some new strategies - cooperative learning, multiple intelligences, active engagement, dialogue, higher level thinking. Unlike Little Church, I get a strong sense that way too often people are bored and are not challenged.