As part of our preparation for planting a church, we’ve had the opportunity as a family to visit a lot of churches over the last year. And I’m not talking about the few random visits here and there that casual church-hoppers claim. We’ve done a virtual church marathon. Others hop, we’ve hurdled.

Over the course of visiting different churches with my family I’ve learned a lot of things but one thing has stuck out to me. I found that people may visit your church for a number of reasons but one of the biggest reasons they visit (or stay) is because of their children.

Here in the Midwest, few people are truly “un-churched” in the common definition of the term. Most are what we would call “de-churched” meaning that they grew up in the church but rarely attend anymore (if at all). In most scenarios it goes something like this:

Jack begins attending Sunday School with his parents or Grandparents when he’s a little boy. He continues attending through grade-school but somewhere between High School and College he abandons church attendance altogether in favor of drinking, girls, parties and other things the church doesn’t offer. That lifestyle of fun and frivolity continues through his mid-20s until he meets Sally and settles down. They buy a little home in the suburbs and have a couple of kids. The overwhelming responsibility of raising children in a messed-up world begins to sink in. Jack and Sally quickly realize that they want more for their kids than the care-free, anything-goes college lifestyle they lived.

And so Jack and Sally go to church.

That scenario is repeated countless times at countless churches across the country every week. Young families with little children in tow are all thinking the same thing when they darken the doors of a church: I’d rather be out at the lake right now but I want my children to be raised in a good home with Christian values.

Jane Roper, a self-confessed religious skeptic, had this to say in an article on Salon called Why I Finally Joined The Church.

I want to expose my children to good, old-fashioned community in a world where, increasingly, community happens only in virtual spaces. I’m a huge fan of blogs, Facebook and Twitter, but I don’t think there will ever be a substitute for sharing the same physical space with a group of people — having conversations, making music together, offering each other a handshake, a smile, or a word of sympathy. I know how earnest this sounds, and the cynic in me cringes to type the words. But the rest of me believes this is the stuff that matters.

Sure, we like to think that it’s our fancy mailers with catchy photographs or dynamic, relevant messages that attract these young families to our church. We see the moms and dads walking through our doors walking hand-in-hand with their kids. Those parents may look like they’re the ones taking their kids but those kiddos are the motivating factor that brought them there. The truth is, most parents are scared to death of the questions they know their kids will ask that they haven’t been able to figure out yet themselves.

Daddy, why do people kill each other?
Mommy, what happens after we die?
Daddy, did my fish go to heaven?

Like I said, we’ve visited a lot of churches. But I’m not convinced every church gets what I’m talking about here. If they did, maybe they would have different people behind the children’s ministry check-in desk. Maybe they would make the check-in process a little easier and more secure to put the parents at ease. Perhaps they would invest more in the children’s area environments, equipment and curriculum instead of sinking the majority of their budget into their sanctuary.

You may see moms and dads driving their children to your church this Sunday but make no mistake, their children are bringing them.