Children’s Ministry in the Third Place: How the Characteristics of Church Culture Impact the Faith Development of Children

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This paper was orginally submitted as a final thesis for completion of a Master of Arts at Moore Theological College, November 2018. It was an overly ambitious attempt to bring together the theological, developmental psychological and sociological insights that are the working assumptions of my understanding of sociocultural faith formation. While it comes with all the failing and frailities of a work submitted for academic credit, it is these ideas which I continue to investigate and develop in my current and future research.

Abstract
Children’s ministry includes the teaching and fostering of faith with regards to the youngest members of the church. The Bible affirms both that children can be members of the gathered faith community, and that they can have genuine, regenerative faith, of their own. Having established this theological foundation, this paper will then apply the child developmentalism of Lev Vygotsky as well as sociological theories of third place community as interpretive lenses through which to argue that the characteristic of the church’s culture impact the faith development of children. The outcome of the research will be an encouragement to churches to develop positive cultural characteristics in order to positively foster childhood faith.