“Boys and Girls” Out, “Comrades” In At A Megachurch’s Children’s Ministry

There are few places left in American life where children can reliably hear that they were made by God as male or female, and that this is good. The church ought to be one of them. Church of the Resurrection in Kansas has decided otherwise.

Children’s ministry workers at the large United Methodist congregation have been given guidance to avoid the words “boys” and “girls.” Suggested replacements include “kiddos,” “folks,” “niblings,” “peep-a-doodles,” and “comrades.” The stated aim is to make every child feel welcome. The actual result is to teach children that the most basic facts about their bodies are awkward, potentially harmful, and best left unsaid in the house of God.

Formation by Another Name

This is not a minor adjustment in pastoral sensitivity. It is a quiet but deliberate act of formation. When a church treats the ordinary language of creation as a problem to be managed, it is no longer merely trying to be kind. It is shaping children in the assumptions of the sexual revolution.

The accompanying materials cited, among other influences, Mila Jam, a transgender activist known for promoting nonbinary identity.  A church’s children’s ministry is not supposed to take its cues from activists whose project is the destabilization of sexual distinction. Yet that is what has occurred. The linguistic preferences of the cultural left are being offered as guidance for how Christian adults should speak to children. The word “comrades” only makes the shift more obvious. It is not the natural speech of Christian nurture. It is the vocabulary of ideology.

Many children are already absorbing confusion from social media, schools, and peers. The church’s responsibility is to clarify reality, not to deepen the fog. True kindness does not require adults to pretend that biological sex is optional or that children benefit from linguistic evasion. It requires them to speak truthfully and refuse to participate in the culture’s demand that we treat sexual distinction as oppressive or imaginary.

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