Why a Pastor Should Care about Children’s Ministry : 9Marks (Santamaria)

MODERN YOUTH WORK AMONG SOME BAPTISTS

We encountered an article by a Baptist Reformed pastor and decided to use it as a typical example of what is passing for sound theology among Reformed Baptists.

“Party Water,” I invented “Party Water.” 

“Party Water” is just water, and the kids all know that. Nonetheless, I use it as a gimmick to advertise “Pastor Ed’s After-School Kids Class.” For the past two decades, I’ve met every Tuesday during the school year at 4 p.m. in my office with the elementary school students of our church. The 90-minute event draws about 15 children each week. 

We eat unhealthy snacks, play dodgeball in the basement, learn vocabulary words like “soteriology,” study a passage of Scripture, color a picture, drink “Party Water,” and dismiss. It’s a pretty simple operation, but it constantly ranks as my favorite ministry activity of the week. 

 I don’t have any deep philosophical underpinnings that support my rationale for doing it. Their parents are members of our church. I am their pastor. They are souls that will spend eternity somewhere, and this is an opportunity to give them the gospel. As I search my heart, I honestly don’t have anything profound to say about the necessity of the senior pastor being involved in ministering directly to children like this. It’s pretty simple. They are people who need the Word of God. My schedule allows me to do it, and I desire to do it. That’s pretty much all there is to it. 

I’m aware that my contribution is merely a supplement to their overall spiritual education. Their primary source for learning about God and His Word must come from home. With that foundational understanding of children’s ministry in place, I stand ready to reinforce what their parents teach them daily. I recall being deeply impacted as a child by the deep concern my pastor showed for my soul. Even though I was unconverted and disinterested in spiritual things, I knew my pastor was invested in my salvation. 

Like all children, I didn’t fully appreciate his commitment to my spiritual well-being until many years later. God only knows what the children of North Shore Baptist Church will remember half a century from now about our after-school class. One cannot do ministry with a crystal ball. The Lord has ordained his desired end for each of these young people. I pray that he, by his gospel, will save them. I also know that the same God who ordained the end has also ordained the means by which that end will be accomplished. 

As pastors, we are to employ the means of preaching the gospel, which is the power of God unto salvation. This we do on Sunday mornings in front of the entire congregation. But it’s also something we can do throughout the week with people of all ages God brings into our path. In Matthew 19:14, Jesus said to his disciples, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the Kingdom of heaven.” Much can be said about what this verse does not mean. Admittedly, it’s a somewhat challenging verse to understand and apply. However, when all the faithful exegesis has been completed, there is no doubt that children were precious in his sight. And they remain precious. As pastors, we must follow the command of our Chief Shepherd, the one who said, “See that you do not despise these little ones” (Matt. 18:10). He was, of course, referring to all believers as the “little ones,” but this certainly includes little believers. 

 As our Lord entered the temple in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, he accepted the praise of the children who cried out, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” Christ then defended their right to extol him as King by quoting David in Psalm 8: “Have you never read, ’Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise’?” (Matt. 21:15–16) Jesus, in the days of his flesh, had an awareness of and a love for the little children. We should love the little children, too. Perhaps your schedule doesn’t allow you to hold a weekly after-school class. Perhaps your church is too big or too little to hold such a gathering. The time, venue, and format are flexible. 

What’s important is that we as pastors intentionally make an effort to show concern for the little ones in our midst. This is not to say there’s no place for a “Director of Children’s Ministries” in a church. Thank God for those who have expertise and gifting in this area! They serve the Kingdom greatly. It is to say, however, that we as pastors should never fall into the trap of thinking we are above caring for the souls of young children. Your context is likely different than mine. You’ll need to responsibly assess your availability. But regardless of your weekly calendar demands, I would urge you to prayerfully consider making a genuine effort to know, to love, to spend time with, and to give the gospel to the children in your church. 

 Also, should you opt to employ the “Party Water” refreshment option, I’ll expect royalties lest you violate the trademark.

https://www.9marks.org/article/why-a-pastor-should-care-about-childrens-ministry/

By Ed Moore¹

OLD SCHOOL BAPTIST VIEW

From a classic Old School / Primitive Baptist lens, this little “Party Water” ministry reads like a warm pastoral heart riding in a buggy labeled Sunday School—even if you never meant to hitch it that way.

What an Old School Baptist would affirm

A pastor personally caring for children in the congregation is not the problem. In fact, the instinct—“I am their pastor… they are souls… I want them to have the Word”—fits the older pastoral model better than modern “outsourcing” to a youth-industrial complex.

You also correctly put the home first (“primary source… must come from home”). Old School folks would shout “amen” to that priority.

Where the Old School Baptist alarm-bells start ringing

The “means” framing is exactly what the Old School split protested.You say: 
God ordained the end, and also ordained the means… we are to employ the means of preaching the gospel, which is the power of God unto salvation. That’s the precise kind of language the Old School Baptists resisted when it was applied to regeneration / eternal salvation. The 1832 Black Rock Address explicitly objects to Sunday Schools for claiming to be “the instituted means” of bringing children to salvation and for claiming the honor of “converting” masses of children—calling those claims “arrogant pretensions.” (Bethlehem PBC Oklahoma City)

Old School shorthand: the gospel is precious and powerful, but not as a humanly-managed instrument that produces the new birth on demand. (They’ll gladly say it’s powerful to call out, comfort, feed, instruct, chasten, and bring “time deliverances,” but they get very spiky when it’s treated as the mechanism of quickening.) (Primitive Baptist)

“Gimmick to advertise” feels like “new measures” DNA.Old School Baptists weren’t humorless—Beebe could be wonderfully sharp—but they distrusted 
carnal attraction as a religious engine. A cutesy brand (“Party Water”) used as an advert for a weekly youth program looks, to them, like the same principle as tract-society marketing: religion pushed by technique rather than carried by truth + Spirit. (Even if your intentions are sincere, Old School critique often targets methods that subtly re-train the church.) (Bethlehem PBC Oklahoma City)

A weekly after-school “kids class” is functionally… a Sunday School cousin.You’re not using a board, curriculum industry, or a “society,” so it’s a simpler version—but the Old School objection wasn’t only “boards are bad.” It was also the broader move toward 
auxiliary institutions that claim spiritual results by system. The Black Rock Address treats Sunday Schools alongside tract societies because they “assume the same high stand.” (Bethlehem PBC Oklahoma City)

How the three Old School “buckets” would react (in your terms)

Absoluters (anti-means instinct): most critical. They’ll like your pastoral tenderness but reject the means-to-regeneration logic and the programmatic “kids class” vibe as a doorway back into the very innovations Black Rock resisted. (Bethlehem PBC Oklahoma City)

Means Baptists (Primitive Baptists who allow more “instrumentality” talk): more open. They may still dislike the marketing/gimmick tone, but they can interpret it as instruction and “time salvation” help, not as the cause of the new birth. (Primitive Baptist)

Conditionalists: generally the most sympathetic to the “God ordains means” framing and would often approve the approach—again, with possible caution about gimmicks.

If an Old School Baptist rewrote this ministry without changing your heart

Keep: pastor knows the children, speaks Scripture, prays, catechizes, and encourages family worship.

Drop/soften: the “advertising” posture and anything that implies this meeting is an instituted pipeline for conversions.

Reframe: not “my weekly means to get them saved,” but “a pastoral opportunity to teach, admonish, and comfort—and to leave regeneration where Old School Baptists insist it belongs: in God’s immediate work.”

In other words, Old School Baptists would say your love is admirable, but your theology-of-method is standing too close to the very fire they spent a century warning churches not to warm their hands by.

Old School Baptists didn’t argue that no one may ever speak truth to children who aren’t biologically theirs. They argued something more pointed (and more explosive): the primary stewardship for children’s religious nurture belongs to parents, and the church must not outsource Christianity into man-made “instruction machines” that imply regeneration can be produced by technique.

Trott (via the Black Rock Address he helped author)

In the Black Rock Address (1832)—a manifesto Samuel Trott helped author—Sunday Schools are rejected in their then-popular religious form because they claimed “the honor of converting” children and functioned as an “instituted means” of bringing them to salvation. The Address says that view rests on the false notion that regeneration is produced by impressions on the natural mind.

Then it makes your exact “parent vs. other teachers” question explicit:

Parents are commanded to raise children “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord,” and that command, the Address says, “instead of countenancing, forbids” parents from entrusting their children’s religious education to “giddy, unregenerated young persons.”

And it adds an important nuance that Old School writers often repeat: they could approve a “Sunday school” as a civil-literacy mercy (teaching poor children to read so they can read Scripture), so long as it is not sold as a conversion-engine and not wrapped in religious ostentation.

Trott’s volume also frames Black Rock’s target as “worldly societies,” explicitly including Sabbath-school societies.

Beebe (directly, in his “Sabbath Schools” objections)

Gilbert Beebe’s most on-point piece is his 1860 reply titled “Sabbath Schools.” His objections line up with Black Rock, but he hammers them with a mallet:

He says the system is built on the false theory that saving religion is a “mere science” that can be taught like grammar or geography—therefore functioning as though it could supersede the Holy Spirit in quickening/regenerating.

He argues it conflicts with the New Covenant promise (he’s echoing Hebrews 8:11 / Jeremiah 31:34 logic): the covenant provides that they shall not need that external “Know the Lord” instruction as the mechanism of knowing God—yet (he says) the “grand object” of the schools is to teach the unregenerate to know the Lord.

He’s especially savage about the spiritual marketing claim that the institution can “promote the salvation” of children—calling such a claim idolatrous rivalry with God’s own “beside me there is no Savior.”

Now, your “Party Water” gimmick lands right in Beebe’s crosshairs for another reason: moral suasion—using incentives and attractions to bend behavior without changing nature. Beebe explicitly mocks the “bend the twig” strategy associated with “Infant and Sunday Schools,” warning that bending doesn’t change the tree: “First make the tree good…” (his point: new nature precedes good fruit; technique can’t manufacture it).

So—should Christian education be left to parents?

From a documented Old School Baptist angle:

Yes, primarily. Parents are the first line of duty, and “outsourcing” children’s spiritual formation to a weekly program is exactly what Black Rock says the parental command forbids when it becomes a substitute or a conversion-scheme.

The church still teaches—just not by inventing a parallel institution. Old School Baptists weren’t anti-teaching; they were anti-machinery: boards, unions, and “schools” that function like spiritual factories and imply the new birth is producible by method.

The practical Old School “shape” of it

If an Old School elder/pastor is going to care for children who aren’t his biologically, he’d typically insist on this posture:

Support parents; don’t replace them. Treat your contact with the children as an extension of pastoral oversight and congregational life, not a competing “system.”

No salesmanship. Don’t hook kids with gimmicks as though attraction produces life—Beebe’s whole “bend the twig” critique is aimed at that psychology.

No implied regeneration-by-program. Teach truth, pray, exhort, and trust God to do what only God does.

Summary: Trott and Beebe don’t forbid pastors from caring about children. They forbid turning that care into an invented institution that displaces parents and pretends conversion can be engineered.

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Endnotes

1. 1. Looks like “Pastor Ed” in Queens (and the “Party Water” piece) is Ed Moore, not “Ed George.”The article you pasted (“Party Water… Pastor Ed’s After-School Kids Class”) is published by 9Marks as “Why a Pastor Should Care about Children’s Ministry” by Ed Moore, identified there as senior pastor of North Shore Baptist Church in Bayside, New York (Queens). (9Marks)North Shore Baptist Church’s own site lists Ed Moore (1992–present) as pastor, and their children’s ministry page explicitly advertises an Afterschool Class in “Pastor Ed’s Office” featuring “party water.” (North Shore Baptist Church)Together for the Gospel also has a “Meet Ed Moore” page saying he’s served as a pastor in Queens, New York for nearly 30 years.On “Pastor Ed George” (Queens NY Baptist): with that exact phrasing, I’m not seeing a clear, credible match tied to Queens or to the “Party Water” ministry. The search results that surfaced under “Ed George” were mostly unrelated “George ___” pastors in other states or generic directory pages, not a Queens Baptist pastor connected to your text. (LinkedIn)So if your goal is to identify the author / church behind the “Party Water” writeup: it’s Ed Moore, North Shore Baptist Church, Bayside (Queens), NY. (9Marks) ↩︎