Imagine it’s 9:15 AM on a Sunday. 

In one room, you are sitting in a circle with a group of 1st and 2nd-graders. You’re handing out crayons and talking about how God created the world. A seven-year-old named Chloe, who has been quietly coloring a picture of a tree, stops. She looks up with complete innocence and asks, “If God made everything, did He make cancer? Because my aunt has it and my mom cries a lot.” 

In another room down the hall, you are sitting with a group of 5th-grade boys. You are talking about Jesus walking on water. Mason, who hasn’t looked up from spinning his fidget toy for ten minutes, casually says, “Yeah, but I watched a YouTube Short this week that said all of this is scientifically impossible. The guy said the Bible was just made up to control people. So… is it?” 

In both circles, the room goes dead silent. Every kid is staring at you. 

In that exact moment, you will feel a massive spike of adrenaline. Your instinct will be to panic. You will feel the immense pressure to give a neatly packaged, instantly comforting church answer, or to awkwardly pivot back to the coloring sheet. 

But if we are paying attention to the culture these kids are growing up in, neither of these questions should surprise us. 

We are leading Gen Alpha. By the time they hit the 5th grade, kids like Mason have consumed more unfiltered skepticism through their iPads than most of us experienced by the time we graduated college. And kids like Chloe are carrying the heavy, confusing emotional realities of a broken world, but they only have a 2nd-grade vocabulary to process it with. 

When a kid drops a heavy question or a massive doubt into your circle, it is a critical intersection. If we shut them down or brush past the tension, they don’t stop asking the question. They just stop asking us. 

This brings us to the second sub-principle of Creating a Safe Place: Respect the Process. 

We talk a lot around here about how the faith of the next generation is worth everything. But an authentic faith is never built overnight. It’s built over time. Respecting the process means we completely change our expectations of what spiritual growth looks like in an elementary kid. 

• We don’t freak out. When a kid brings up a heartbreaking reality or a wildly incorrect theological idea they heard online, we don’t panic. We lean in. We realize that doubt isn’t the enemy of faith; unspoken doubt is. 

• We let kids be kids. We remember that a 2nd grader thinks in completely concrete terms, and a 5th grader is just beginning to think abstractly. We don’t expect a 7-year-old or a 10-year-old to process grief or theology like a 40-year-old adult. 

• We play the long game. Our goal isn’t to force them to have a perfectly resolved faith by the time their parents pick them up at 10:15 AM. Our goal is to guide them as they grow. 

Creating a safe place means your circle is a space where it is entirely okay to be a work in progress. It’s a place where a kid can ask a terrifying question, and your response is simply, “That is a really great question. Let’s talk about it.” 

As you head into your week, I want you to think about your own journey: 

Think back to a time in your life when you hit a wall of doubt or faced a reality that made you question God. Did the leaders around you respect your process and lean in, or did they rush to give you a quick answer to make themselves comfortable? How did their reaction shape the way you view the church today? 

Think about that. Because this weekend, you get to hold the space for a kid who is just trying to figure it all out. d for someone else.