Reimagining worship through a child’s eyes: A conversation with Rev. Daryn Stylianopoulos

VALLEY FORGE, PA (12/11/2025)—Through the Nurturing Children Initiative (NCI), American Baptist Home Mission Societies (ABHMS) hopes to fuel a culture shift that embraces children’s natural curiosity, creativity, and forms of physical expression in the corporate, intergenerational worship environment. NCI will convene a total of 36 congregations in three cohorts (12 congregations per cohort) from 2025-2029 and provide them with child-development experts, youth programmatic leadership, and resources. NCI encourages participating churches to create opportunities within the context of corporate worship and prayer for the youngest among us to be affirmed and nurtured in who they are, encouraged in their faith, empowered in their gifts, and incorporated fully into the body of Christ.

Rev. Dr. Anna Piela, ABHMS’ senior writer and associate editor of The Christian Citizen, recently spoke with Rev. Daryn Stylianopoulos, the NCI program director, about this groundbreaking initiative.

Interview responses have been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Thank you for sitting down with me to tell me more about the Nurturing Children Initiative! Can you tell me in a few words what it is about?

The Nurturing Children Initiative is encouraging our American Baptist churches to think about children and their role in our lives of faith and how faith meets them in their own individual journeys of faith. It is inviting churches to create spaces for children in the context of worship and prayer to share their gifts and wisdom—with the recognition that they have gifts and wisdom to offer our churches, and that we have a lot to learn from them.

And is this initiative a part of a larger trend within the church?

I think some churches have realized it for a long time. For example, we have one church, a potential participant in this cohort, which has more children than adults. So just by the nature of their composition, they have had to recognize children as active leaders in their congregation. However, I will say that researchers have come to understand that children can process deeply ideas of faith and God. They begin forming their concepts of fairness and what is right and what is wrong and just thinking about their relationships with the world at a much earlier age than folks once supposed. It used to be that people thought that children needed to be at least 10 years old before they could even think about these spiritual things. Now we know that they begin to classify their world from infancy. They begin to compartmentalize their world in different ways. By the time they’re four years old, they begin to make their judgments about what is fair and what is good, who is nice and who is not. So, I think that as our culture sort of catches up with the notion that children are very competent and capable from a young age, our churches are more able to recognize that children have the capacity to be contributors to our communities in beautiful ways. If we had really been paying attention, we would have noticed that Jesus welcomed, embraced, blessed and named the children as a part of the Kingdom of God, He even encouraged us to be like children in in realizing the kingdom of God for this world.

As we find more churches in decline, churches are paying attention to what is going to sustain them. They recognize children as a vessel for carrying faith forward into the future. And we often hear that children are the future of the church, and there is some truth to that. They are also here and now—with their rich gifts. They are very much the present of the church as well. But I think it’s the concern for the future of the church that has brought people’s attention to where we are currently, and the necessity of sharing faith in more effective ways with children. What’s really important is conveying love of God and Christ to them in a way that lets them know that this faith is as much theirs as it is anybody else’s, that they are a part of the church, and that their voice, their perspective and their gifts and wisdom matter to the church.

Based on the applications that you received, have there been any practices that they mentioned that really jumped out at you as innovative and creative in terms of integrating children into worship?

Some of our applicants have children involved in their worship services every Sunday, and the children help with Scripture reading. They write their own liturgies for things like the blessing of the animals. Every year, they contribute prayers that they’ve written to the corporate worship service. So, it’s not even about them necessarily helping with the service. They are actually contributing their voices, their own words to the service. There’s one church that has a step team ministry, which is another beautiful cultural iteration of innovation within this context. Step is often associated with African American tradition and culture; it’s a way of creating rhythm with your body that conveys a sense of purpose. That has become a part of this church’s ministry with their children. Another church had a youth member who chaired an installation service. So just entrusting events or occasions of the church to the stewardship of their youth is another innovative practice. I think this is something that stood out to our team as we reviewed these applications: the willingness to see children as capable of doing big things.

 And what about beyond the worship service? What about different practices of  ministry outside the four walls of the church?

Yeah, a number of churches mentioned that their children participated in visits to folks living without homes. There’s one church that has something called “a blessings box,” and it’s the children’s responsibility every week to fill that box with items that might be useful to people in their communities like socks or feminine hygiene products or diapers.

There was one beautiful example of a church where they had an intergenerational service focused on peace and peacemaking in the world. As an intergenerational activity for that service, the children and the adults all folded paper cranes—origami paper cranes —together, and they talked about being peacemakers, so that children can understand that they too are a part of this effort of peacemaking in their communities. It’s not just adults who do this thing.

So, summing up, what’s the goal of the initiative?

We’re putting together a cohort of 12 churches that are already doing this work well. We’ll be learning from them about their best practices, and they will be learning from field ministry and child development experts and other places of intersection. We’ll be bringing in folks who know how to provide space for children who have specialized needs and can really speak to how we can be more interculturally aware. The cohort will be learning about that. It is comprised of both adults and children, so in and of itself, is intergenerational learning.

Our hope is that we’ll build a repository of resources that help churches to think about what it means to live out best practices when it comes to children’s ministry, ministry with and for children in our churches. And then we have two more cohorts coming up—in 2027 and 2028. The 2027 cohort will be for churches who want to incorporate children in their communities. That’ll be our Striving Congregations cohort, and then the 2028 cohort will be for churches who are intentional about creating space for children with specialized needs. Churches.

Thank you for this conversation.

Interview by Rev. Anna Piela, senior writer for ABHMS and associate editor of The Christian Citizen