Evangelism among Children

Welcome to the children’s evangelism pages of the Church of England website. The content of these pages aims to provide information about the ways that the Church of England is addressing the challenges and opportunities of engaging with children to help them to hear and respond to the Gospel message. They also offer advice for anyone who is interested in helping children to discover the Gospel – children’s workers, clergy, parents, teachers, and anyone else who is searching for information.

Jesus called a little child to him whom he set among them. Then he said, ‘Truly I tell you,  unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.' (Matt 18:2-4).

Evangelism among children takes many forms, not least, by children among themselves.

• It is about opening doors to the life that Jesus promised in all its fullness.
• It is about creating opportunities so that, when God puts his hand on a child’s shoulder, and calls his or her name, (and that might not happen until the child is grown up or middle aged), that person will be able to recognise his voice and will know how to respond to it.
• Every Christian has a duty to proclaim the Gospel to every generation as part of his or her baptismal calling.
• Evangelism is about witness as much as overt teaching. This happens in the playground and the wider community as much as in church based activities: ‘If you have seen a child, you are doing children’s evangelism.’
• Evangelism can only take place from within a culture. We need to engage with children where they are rather than try to make them the children that we were or to encourage them to embrace the culture of a middle-aged Church.
• Evangelism among children is long term work and we may not see results. We are sowing seeds and have to entrust them to the Lord of the Harvest.

About these pages

To help you navigate through our information:

• the centre column gives you general information about the captioned topic
• the right hand column yellow buttons allow the reader to choose related subjects to read further
• the left hand column entitled "resources" will list out all the related documents for reference and download