Children are part of the bride of Christ. As such, they ought not to be prohibited from learning how to commune (in corporate worship) with their Lord. They ought to be knit together with us. But this is not accomplished by sitting in a pew thinking wishful thoughts. We have to do what God told us to do—sing, hear, pray, say amen, stand, kneel, eat, chew, drink and swallow—and we have to do it all in true evangelical faith. Because we hold children back from this, they either fall away, or their devotional zeal (which has somehow survived) is diverted into other more individualistic directions. They become the top Bible-verse kid at Awana, and we wonder in later years why they don't have a high view of the Church. In this the Church is like parents who put their kids in day care for years, and forty years later wonder why the kids put them in the rest home. We are to instill ecclesiastical loyalty in our children by the scriptural means, and keeping them back from the Table is not that way.
- Doug Wilson
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