What to Say When Your Child Says Church Is Boring

You are barely out of the parking lot when your seven year old says it, flat, to the window. “Church was so boring.”

And something in you drops a little, because you did not hear a review of the sermon. You heard the opening line of a much longer story about a kid who eventually stops going.

Take a breath. It is almost never that.

What to say when your child says church is boring

Start with the part that is true, because they will notice if you skip it. It is boring sometimes. Denying that in the front seat costs you credibility you will want later.

Christina Embree, who writes at Refocus Ministry, has a sentence for exactly this moment: “I know it can be boring sometimes, but that’s not why we go to church. We go to church because we are part of the body of Christ. And you are an important part of Christ’s body. If you aren’t there, a piece is missing.”

Look at what that does. It concedes the fact and quietly changes the question. Your child was asking whether church earned its forty minutes. The answer moves it to belonging, which is a claim about them rather than a review of the service.

You do not have to say it that smoothly. “Yeah, some of it is boring. We still go, because that’s our people and you’re part of it” is the same sentence in your own mouth.

Most of the time, it is a vocabulary problem

Natasha Crain, a Christian parenting author and speaker, lists seven reasons kids get bored at church, and the second is the least dramatic one: “‘Adult’ church is beyond their current grasp.”

Sit in a service and count what a sermon assumes you already know. Covenant. The exile. Grace. Whoever the pastor mentions in passing, expecting a nod. A child who has never heard about the friends who cut a hole in the roof to lower a man to Jesus cannot follow a sermon that opens there, so for that stretch the room really is just noise and hard seating.

This is fixable, and not with better children’s programming. Kids who already know the stories sit differently. They catch the name. They lean over and whisper “I know that one,” which is not reverent and is completely fine. Familiarity does most of the work that entertainment gets credit for.

Three small things in the pew

Embree suggests a few practical moves, all of them low effort:

• Sit toward the front, “where it is easier for your little ones to see and hear what is going on.” The back row is mostly the backs of heads.
• Let them doodle and color. “Often when their hands are busy, their minds are engaged with the service more than you realize.”
• Sing and pray visibly yourself. Children learn a service by watching the adult next to them do it.

None of that is a fix for boredom. It just gives a body something to do while the mind catches up.

Do not answer fun with more fun

Crain’s first reason is worth sitting with: too much emphasis on fun at Sunday school. If church has been sold to your child as the best part of their week, the ordinary Sunday is going to feel like a broken promise, and you will be stuck raising the bid every year.

It is a kinder deal to tell them the truth early. Some of this you will love, some of it you will sit through, and both of those are normal for the adults here too.

When boring means something else

Sometimes the complaint is not about the service. Crain’s counsel is to go find out: “Have a conversation with them about what they currently believe regarding God, Jesus, and the Bible. You may be surprised what you learn.” If the boredom turns out to be rooted in doubt, then the doubt is the actual conversation, and it is a much better one to be having at eight than at eighteen.

Ask it without alarm in your voice, some ordinary Tuesday. “Do you think any of it is true?” Then let them answer badly, and do not correct the first draft.

Paul was writing to a whole congregation when he took the trouble to say that the unimpressive parts are not optional. “On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.” (1 Corinthians 12:22) And then, without qualification: “Now you are the body of Christ, and each of you is a member of it.” (1 Corinthians 12:27)

A bored eight year old in the fourth row is a member of it. Nobody in that room is there on the strength of how interesting they found it.

This Sunday

Retire “How was church?” on the drive home. It gets you “fine” or “boring” and nothing else. Ask instead: “What’s one word you heard that you didn’t know?” Then answer it, in one sentence, at their level, and let the subject drop.

Bedtime Bible Stories tells 82 Bible stories four separate times, once for each age band from two on up, which is an unhurried way to hand a child the background a sermon assumes they already have.