The Value of Children

The following excerpt is from Wess Stafford's book Too Small To Ignore. Wess is the president and CEO of Compassion International.

"On that occasion I went on to tell the story I often tell of Dr. Tony Campolo, well-known author and sociologist at Eastern University outside Philadelphia. He grew up in that city, and one day while downtown he got the notion to drive by his old boyhood church. He knew the demographics of the neighborhood had changed several times since his childhood, and the congregation had gone from white to black to Asian to...now, nothing. He drove up to the familiar address to see plywood covering the windows of the sanctuary. Deterioration was on every side.

Dr. Campolo was sad-but also curious. He began to muse, What kills a church? What makes a once thriving church wither away and die? He decided to make his boyhood church a case study.

Finding the last group of elders, he introduced himself and then said, 'I'm interested in the life cycle of this church. Do you still have the records? May I study them?' They told him where to find the archives-in the basement of the building in a vault behind a door nailed shut. Dr. Campolo showed up a few days later with a crowbar and managed to pry open the room. Sweeping away the cobwebs, he stared at the stack of annual reports. Where do I begin? he wondered. I know, he said to himself, I'll start at the year I gave my life to Christ as a boy. He rustled through the stack until he found the report. Opening its yellow pages, he began to read.

That had not been a particularly good year for the church, the author admitted. Giving was down from the previous year. Mission activity was subdued. Attendance had declined. There were only three conversions over the course of the year, and they were 'just children'. Dr. Campolo stared at the page in disbelief and irritation. Wait a minute! he said out loud. I was one of those three! And I know the other two. One spent his life in mission service in Africa, while the other became president of a seminary here in the United States...What do you mean, just three children came to Christ that year?

The sociologist had found his answer to his research question. A church begins to die when it says, 'They were just children.' If that is the mind-set, decline and decay will surely follow."