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ministry, and be the most comfortable with talking to children about the gospel of Jesus Christ in the church. Furthermore, due to this particular population sample, the rest of the church body would most likely score lower than the participants on the surveys, which is important considering one of the stated purposes and goals was to change the entire church’s attitude toward child evangelism. I will evaluate each of the five goals individually and provide comments about each.
Goal 1: To Evaluate the Church’s
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effective way because, as worded currently, there may be some debate on whether or not the battlefront is for children’s hearts or the hearts of humanity. The participants agreed that the battlefront for children’s hearts is extremely important as they answered to an average of 5.63. These two average answers show that the participants hold to two important facts in the church. First, the church must not supersede parents nor should parents delegate their scriptural duty of teaching their children to the church. Second, the participants showed the knowledge and understanding that children are important, and they need the message of Jesus Christ to change their hearts. Again, these convictions are held by the participants who are currently working with the children’s ministry, therefore the assumption would be that the church’s attitude overall would be somewhere below these averages.
The questions that the participants scored, on average, the furthest away from a scriptural viewpoint were mostly associated with how to share the gospel with children in child language. In fact, three of the four lowest average scores on the entire survey came from the “Kid Friendly Language” section of the survey. This fact is significant
considering there were only five questions concerning kid friendly terminology on the survey. In other words, on three of five questions the participants did not, on average, provide answers that were accurate usages of kid friendly language. What these answers show in the pre-test is a lack of understanding on how to share the gospel with children.
Specifically, the participants showed a lack of understanding for how to explain the concepts of punishment, crucifixion, and Savior to children as they scored on average, 3.38, 3.25 and 3.63, respectively. These statistical findings show that the participants in the children’s ministry currently do not know how to share the gospel with children in a child appropriate way. In fact, the statistics show that, because the answers were on average below 4, the participants disagreed with a correct usage of child friendly
language. Again, as with the answers that were most correct, this analysis is of answers from people currently in children’s ministry. An acceptable assumption, therefore, would
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lead the analysis to infer that the overall church attitude would score lower than the participants in this project.
To finish the analysis of this goal, I will explore some interesting findings concerning the participants’ attitudes in order to show that this project’s goals have been accomplished. One of the interesting findings was that there is not a deeply held
conviction concerning the purpose of children’s ministry. On the question about the focus of children’s ministry being about fun, the average answer score was 4.75. This answer score (by utilizing the Likert Scale) is representative of an answer somewhere between disagree and somewhat disagree. In other words, the participants only
somewhat disagreed or disagreed with the children’s ministry focus to be upon fun. If the average score had been above 5 then the statistics would have shown a much more deeply held conviction about the focus of children’s ministry not being about fun. This statistic shows that there is a lack of understood purpose for the children’s ministry inside the children’s ministry workers and must be even more misunderstood in the general congregation.
Another interesting finding was about children’s cognitive abilities, specifically about children’s abstract or concrete thinking abilities. On this question which stated, “Children are abstract thinkers from about two years old to ten years old’”
the average score was 3.63. As with the last interesting score, this shows there is a lack of understanding of how children think. This is problematic for children’s ministry workers, but it may also show a simple lack of understanding of what the term concrete and abstract thinkers mean.
A third and final interesting score was the score of 3.75 to question number
eighteen. The question reads, “Most children have a one-time exposure experience to the gospel and trust Christ based on that one-time experience.” The correct answer would be that most children do not have a one-time experience with the Gospel and trust Christ, but the participants’ average score places the group somewhere between somewhat agree and
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somewhat disagree with the statement. What this fact shows is that there is a lack of understanding of how most people, especially children, come to Christ after continued exposure to the gospel. The attitude, therefore, of the church must be somewhat unclear as well, leading to a misunderstanding of the gospel’s work in people’s lives.
Goal 2: To Develop Curriculum to Teach