It may be important to teach children theology, but kids are much more likely to experience God and his love through something simpler: the presence of caring, trustworthy adults.
That’s according to a new study from World Vision, which surveyed more than 4,600 children across eight countries in partnership with researchers from Harvard, Duke, and Claremont Graduate University. The Hope & Love Measure also relied on consultation with pastors and theologians across denominations in Bosnia, Ghana, Malaysia, and South India, among other nations.
“We learned that children experience the love of God primarily through their families, through their parents,” World Vision CEO Edgar Sandoval Sr. told CT in an interview. “It’s not surprising. That’s God’s design for the world: We were born into families.”
World Vision started by interviewing 77 sponsored children in Bolivia and El Salvador. The survey then expanded to include 658 children across Albania, Bolivia, Iraq, Lesotho, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Uganda and concluded with additional cross-cultural testing.
One overarching takeaway: the importance of human connection. The kids’ responses, per World Vision’s report, indicated that the most powerful hope they experience is not abstract but “relationally grounded.” Kids understood God’s love “through lived experiences of trust, protection, forgiveness, encouragement, and belonging,” Harvard research associate Jennifer Wortham said in an interview.
Many children spoke positively about prayer and religious practices, viewing “trust in divine guidance as central to overcoming” challenging situations, according to the report. This was especially true of kids in Bolivia, Iraq, Lesotho, and Senegal—nations facing “unimaginable suffering through conflict, climate shocks, displacement, hunger,” as Sandoval said.
“Everywhere I travel, I see children bearing the brunt of all these macro forces that work against their potential,” he added. “But the most powerful tool to combat poverty is actually not aid. It’s identity. These children were created in the image of a God who loves them.”
They just need adults to show them. Plenty of kids around the world, after all, still encounter abuse, neglect, or abandonment. So “resilience should never be romanticized,” Wortham said. “Children are remarkably adaptive, but adaptation is not the same as flourishing.”
This is why broader communities—teachers, coaches, clergy, church bodies—may be necessary for kids whose “earliest experiences of love have been fractured, absent, or betrayed,” Wortham added. Not every child has the benefit of parents, grandparents, or siblings who earn their trust.
“I didn’t have school shoes for a long period of time and that made me feel uncomfortable at school,” one child, from Lesotho, told researchers. “My principal promised to buy me school shoes but till today she hasn’t bought them. … This affected me negatively because I don’t have happiness at school. This taught me that life is not easy.”
Rather than separate a child’s spiritual formation from these physical relationships, the World Vision study deliberately assessed data through a holistic lens, suggesting a child’s spirituality “cannot be isolated … from other aspects of their personhood.”
Kate Lawson-Hedger, author of the forthcoming book Praying with Kids, said in an interview that she’s encountered some people who think that kids’ ministry is “just something we do to get parents to come to church” and that a child’s faith is “trite and not real.”
“In the West,” she said, “we intellectualize faith so much. ‘Do you believe this set of creeds?’ But the people in the Bible experience Jesus. … It’s trust. It’s relational. It’s embodied.”
As kids become young adults, Lawson-Hedger explained, they might visualize God more symbolically—a dove to represent peace, a cross for sacrifice, an eye in the sky for all-knowing presence. At an early age, however, children often interpret things literally. They’re “very bound in their experience of the world in material ways.”
So if their caregivers provide comfort and guidance, they already have a template for a loving relationship with God. Lawson-Hedger recalled a children’s church exercise where kids were asked to draw God, and one boy doodled a person who was “half his mom and half his dad.”
One surveyed child, from Uganda, told researchers about having never owned a mattress until a grandfather bought one as a surprise gift at the start of the school year. “I realized,” the child shared, “that God … cares for us even in times of need [and] appoints people to help.”
Kids are also more likely to experience God through adults because children can’t help but be present, Lawson-Hedger said. Grownups are juggling full schedules and long-term plans, whereas kids’ frontal lobes aren’t fully developed. They’re in the moment. They need care, attention, and guidance. This is especially true of those with intellectual disabilities, who are no less pursued by God and deserve to experience his love, Sandoval said, via “family coming alongside them.”
Chris Ammen, author of Raising Disciples at Home and founder of Kaleidoscope, which publishes elementary-age Bible books, was a children’s pastor for 15 years. He often encountered type A parents who sought specific, practical resources for discipling their new families.
“I’ve yet to see a 1- or 2-year-old sit down and read their Bible,” Ammen said in an interview. “God saves children by his Word through his Spirit, not through picking out the right board book.” So he encouraged parents to first ensure their kids are seen and secure. “As they grow, the hope is they say, ‘Oh, God treats me a lot like the people he’s put in my life.’”
This is also the stance of the Center for Faith and Children (CFC), which has lamented the American culture’s “idolization of productivity”—and the church’s following suit.
Too often, CFC experts say, well-meaning Christians lean on polished programs or “spiritual busywork”—or defer all mentorship to Sunday school—rather than prioritizing slow, everyday formation in the home. Devotionals and direct teachings serve a purpose, but they can’t replace regular routines of a father praying with his daughter, a mother holding honest conversations with her son, or a family preparing dinner for church meal trains.
“So much of the rhetoric around deconstruction is people saying God’s not safe,” Ammen said. “I just have to believe that messaging started really early in life for a lot of people.”
Wortham, who also serves as program lead for Harvard’s Initiative on Faith and Child Flourishing, encourages parents to model God’s consistent, unconditional presence—not to focus primarily on measuring achievements or behavior.
“Children pay far more attention to what adults do than to what they say,” she explained. When parents discipline within a context of affection and commitment, seek forgiveness for their own mistakes, serve those in need, or respond to hard times with hope rather than despair, they reflect to their children “the very heart of God’s love.”
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