What Will We Do with the Children God Has Placed Within Our Reach

The child is not merely the future of the church; she is a living part of the present of God's kingdom, with a real role to play today, not just a promise for the future. Investing in the next generation begins at home and requires persevering patience, not haste for quick, visible results. No spiritual neglect is neutral. The church that grasps this reality invests its best resources, time, attention, and capable people, in the children already within its reach, rather than treating them as a secondary area of its ministry structure.

The most valuable inheritance one generation can pass on to the next is spiritual: a living faith, communicated with faithfulness and consistency, not merely religious knowledge passed on out of obligation. César Moisés Carvalho observed that, in order to properly answer their children's questions, the parents of Israel first needed to know their own faith well. According to him, many of the great spiritual problems Israel faced throughout its history had their roots precisely in the neglect of religious education for new generations, both formal and informal, inside and outside the temple. Paul reminded the Corinthians: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Cor 3:6). So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters holds the central place, for the growth has always come, and always will come, from God himself (1 Cor 3:7).

Throughout this entire feature on children in missions, a single thread has run consistently: the child already takes part in God's work today, possesses full dignity as the image of God, learns in specific ways that must be respected, needs serious and structured protection, and, when she is a missionary's child, faces identity-related challenges that the church often overlooks out of unfamiliarity. None of these themes is peripheral to the church's mission. Together, they form an essential part of that mission, not a sentimental appendix reserved only for those with a particular gift or affinity for working with children.

In the end, a question remains that every church must answer honestly before God: what will we do with the children the Lord has placed within our reach? Not children in the abstract, mentioned in some distant mission report, but the concrete children of our own congregation, our own neighborhood, and our own family. Neglect is never neutral. The spiritual void left uncared for today will be filled tomorrow by something else, another voice, another kind of formation the church did not choose.

Choose a specific child from your family or your church and commit before God to invest in her for years to come, not just for a season of enthusiasm. Reassess, together with your church's leadership, whether any of the themes covered in this feature, dignity, evangelism, discipleship, learning, protection, and care for missionary kids, still needs to become concrete practice in your context. Pray also, even today, to the Lord of the harvest, asking him to raise up more workers who are prepared and committed to the coming generations. After all, investing well in today's children is, in large measure, deciding in advance what kind of church will exist twenty years from now.