Retelling the Biblical Story
If you’ve already signed up for the online Sharing Faith Workshop this Friday, you are in for a treat! Carol Wehrheim is a legend.
I first met Carol when I was a new Associate Pastor for Christian Education, attending a meeting of Presbyterian Church Educators, where she was giving a workshop on the same topic she’ll be addressing this Friday: retelling the biblical story as the children’s sermon. As the person responsible for giving children’s sermons at my church, I was looking for any help I could get. There were books with pithy talks that were hard to connect with the scripture of the day, or felt too abstract to be meaningful for actual children. What was the children’s sermon actually for?
What I remember from that workshop, some twenty years later, is that the Children’s Sermon shouldn’t be a dumbed-down version of the sermon, nor should it put children on the spot as our comedic relief. Rather than try to make a point using analogies or metaphors that kids don’t understand, use the tools that kids are already familiar with: stories. And what better stories do we have for teaching faith than the Bible?
Carol Wehrheim has spent decades teaching this method of retelling Bible stories for the children’s sermon, and I’m so grateful to get to learn from her again.
And if you are interested in learning even more creative ways of thinking through worship from a child’s perspective and how to more fully integrate them into worship leadership, consider signing up for our Children in Worship Cohort beginning in January. Applications are now open, but act quick—the deadline is November 1.
~ The Rev. Dr. Carolyn B. Helsel
We are looking for pairs of participants - a children’s minister and senior/worship pastor - from various churches to join a 6-month-long cohort community to explore the role of children in worship through guided conversations. These small groups will meet twice monthly on Zoom and create a supportive space where participants can reflect on how faith is experienced and shared within their congregations.
The Children in Worship Cohort requirements:
One pair of church staff members willing to commit to twice-monthly meetings together. This pair will be composed of (a) your congregation's children's ministry leader and (b) the senior pastor/worship leader.
Each member of the pair needs the ability to meet online through Zoom.
In order to facilitate conversation, churches in the cohort should have gone through the Listening Tour or should schedule a Listening Tour visit.
Applications will close on November 1, 2025 and the cohort will be announced by November 15, 2025. A church’s application to the cohort is not complete until both applications have been submitted. The plan will be to hold twice-monthly meetings from January to June 2026.