The Sacrament of Family in Mass that's Missing in Worship

The Sacred M(e)ss is Holy—The Protestant Failure to Follow Anyone But Modern Experts is Costing us our Children

In only the three Catholic Mass services I have attended (making me no expert), I've been starkly confronted with a reality that increasingly troubles me about a lifetime of Protestant worship. While I value the Sunday School and children's church programs I've taught in for years, I'm beginning to see how removing children from worship has slowly eroded something essential in Protestant churches.

In Mass, families worship together. Yes, there are crying babies, squirming toddlers, and distracted children. Yet the Catholic Church tolerates these disruptions because they understand something profound—the presence of the whole family in worship matters. Children aren't hidden away or treated as disruptions to be managed. When a child knocks over a kneeling bench, a thousand people don’t give the parents the evil eye.

You have to remember this is a space that is treated with far more reverence and respect than Protestants treat their spaces. Unlike many Protestants, they don’t have discussions about removing their permanent pews so they can turn the worship center into a venue for games for the youth. Catholics believe Christ can be encountered here in a literal way at the altar.

With this in mind, Children are still valued participants in this sacred space, learning through presence what it means to be part of the body of Christ. They are not ushered out when the singing starts or before tithe to go play games, have a snack, and have a more appropriate child-friendly message that every educational psychologist will recommend. Mass is worship, encountering Christ, and more reverential than I can pretend to understand. It’s a Holy act.

This stands in stark contrast to many Protestant services where children and workers are removed from worship. We justify this through our commitment to age-appropriate Biblical education, but in doing so, we fragment the family unit during our most sacred time together. This practice speaks volumes about our theology—subtly suggesting that children aren't precious to the Lord, that worship is primarily about adult comprehension rather than communal presence. Sister Franny needs her peace and quiet to sing to Jesus and Brother Tom needs few unmanaged kids running up and down the aisles.

This small thing of where we place our tiny ones isn’t a trifling issue. Rather, it’s quite troubling. This segregation of children from worship has broader implications. When Prostestants remove children from our central act of worship, we make it easier to minimize the importance of family in other areas of life.

Our pastors have less authority to tell parents that issues like contraception or abortion are matters of personal choice rather than a Holy or Godly concern when God doesn’t seem to be concerned with kids during the worship of Him. The Catholic Church's unwavering stance on these issues flows naturally from their embodied practice of valuing children and families in worship. It’s not a small issue to value children in Mass or Worship services and it won’t be a small issue in how we move forward in understanding how God sees children.

As I've attended Mass, I've noticed that everyone participates. No one is left outside tending to the children, missing the sacred moments of communion with God and community. There's a deep understanding that worship isn't about achieving perfect order or attention, but about being present in the family of God.

The Catholic inclusion of Children reflects a sacramental understanding of family that's increasingly absent in Protestant churches—even in ones that describe themselves as Biblical. As Protestant churches adopt worldly views about children from psychology and philosophy that aren’t grounded first in Christian theology, they are in danger of not only changing practices, but in subtling changing God’s perfect wisdom.

While we've excelled at creating programs and educational opportunities, we may have lost something profound—the recognition that family itself is sacred, that the mere presence of children in worship shapes our understanding of what it means to be the church.

I worry that the Protestant tradition is facing an existential threat if we continue to reflect the world's values rather than Christ's. As our churches increasingly fragment families and accommodate secular individualism, we risk losing the embodied wisdom preserved in Catholic worship for 2000 years.

The danger of the Protestant church is we don’t have any traditions to anchor us. We don’t have wisdom to guide us in our interpretation that has been time-tested. Instead, we allow the personal opinion of one man (supposedly guided by the Holy Spirit) to determine our entire course. While it worked for a long time, it could only last when we were a moral people tied first to God.

We’re no longer a moral church tied to a moral theology. We’ve given that up to be tied to the theology of Freud and Marx and we don’t even see it. We have allowed the theories of educational psychology to help us develop our worship services for our children.

Piaget, an atheist who developed his theory of cognitive development in the mid-20th century, and Freire, a Marxist who created his critical pedagogy in the 1960s, have somehow become more authoritative voices on children's spiritual formation than 2000 years of Church wisdom. While both men made observations about how children learn, neither had any interest in spiritual formation or belief in divine revelation, yet Protestant churches eagerly adopted their educational theories simply because they were new and "scientific."

The irony is profound - we've allowed two recent secular thinkers, one indifferent to faith and one militantly hostile to traditional religious instruction, to reshape how we introduce children to God, discarding centuries of proven spiritual formation practices in favor of theories that are barely half a century old. They teach the material, they buy the material, and they create the material and have no idea who influenced the material they give to their children.

Most Protestants are wholly unaware of the contributions of Marxists and Atheists to how we have treated children in the church—how we have removed children from holy and sacred places. Yet they willingly, gleefully remove their children because they don’t have the 2000 years of history from the Church fathers to correct their adoption of an angry God-hating Marxist like Freire from the 60s. The only one who benefits from this arrangement is Satan—not our children.

Protestants have built worship services to make God more accessible to children in a time when we needed to learn how to make our children more accessible to God through worship. We make God accessible through reason and the mind (which is corrupted by the fall) rather than through Faith which is a gift from the incorruptible God.

The presence of whole families in Mass isn't just a liturgical choice—it's a living theology that shapes how we understand family, culture, and the state. Theology shapes Worship and Worship shapes Theology. You can’t have the good practice without good teaching.

The Catholic Mass preserves something Protestants desperately need to recover—the understanding that worship isn't just about individual spiritual education but about the formation of families and communities in the presence of God.

As we rush headlong into the hellish abyss to make our services more efficient and age-appropriate, we might be losing the Sacred mess that brings our families closer to God.