More Thoughts on Worship Etiquette

Eowyn's Heir tried to post the comment below on my "Worship Etiquette" post from last week, but the comment came through to my email but not the blog.  I decided to post her comment separately, because I think she raises an interesting point about how we parents have trained our children to distract themselves during worship.  (And some never outgrow it!) Other comments welcomed!

"I'm all for babies being in service with their parents if they're tiny and quiet... and if they sit in the back!!! Seriously, what's with sitting on the front row?

On a related note, one of my pet peeves is families who expect their small children to sit through entire sermons-- I'm talking under 5 here. There is no. way. at. all. those kids are taking in anything from the sermon-- sure, they're observing how adults worship corporately, learning sermon-note-taking etiquette, but they can get that in the first 20 minutes of singing/praying. Why does it bother me? Because they ARE learning how to distract themselves from the sermon, either by eating copious amounts of goldfish, by drawing, by sleeping, or by playing. In a few years we're going to be wanting them to do the OPPOSITE-- to pay attention! Far better to train them to sit at home (family worship) and to let them actually learn Scripture in classes on their level, and be gradually introduced to the "big service" as they have the maturity to handle it. My home church had kids in most of the Wed. night prayer service starting at age 3 (the kids were taken for their own prayer groups half-way through), in for the singing during the morning service starting at age 4 (class provided during evening service), and all the way through the services starting at 1st grade (when they're learning to read and write). I thought that was really sensible. "