Children and youth have been largely positioned within the discipline of practical theology internationally and in many local contexts of theological education. Ironically, there is still much theological reflection required through the lived realities and experiences of these youth. The 2026 Presidential theme calls for re-visioning and imagining the future of practical theologies that take the place and voice of children and young people seriously. This co-sponsored session gathers presentations that investigate the complex and multifaceted relation between religion and childhood functions as a forum for focused interdisciplinary and interreligious dialogue about the diverse relations of children and religion.
Using Springtide Research Institute’s mixed-methods findings on 15–22-year-olds, this presentation reframes the AAR theme “Future/s” around a practical-theological question: what communal conditions make faith livable for teens and emerging adults? The data suggest a connection–communion gap: many retain religious/spiritual identity while worship attendance and embedded participation are uneven, and older youth participate less frequently in both religious and nonreligious groups. I propose “threshold community” as an analytic construct for ecclesial spaces that lower entry barriers while building pathways to belonging, meaning-making, and agency. Interpreted through koinonia, mystagogy, accompaniment, and charism-centered leadership formation, the argument treats young people as diagnosticians of formative infrastructures rather than deficits to be fixed. The session introduces a compact Connection–Communion Diagnostic to map threshold costs, communion practices, and agency pathways. Participants generate a one-page “communion pathway map” to locate where ministries leak connection into disengagement, and identify redesign options for co-responsible leadership and hopeful futures.
This paper draws on qualitative research exploring God-experiences among Protestant adults who were raised in Korean residential child care institutions. Participants’ childhoods were marked by abandonment, violence, and structural marginalization, situating them in what I term borderland spaces—lived realities close to death, on the periphery of society, and in positions of powerlessness. Yet their testimonies of survival and the ways in which God-experiences functioned within these conditions—both death-dealing and life-giving—reveal theological wisdom for sustaining the present and envisioning futures from within trauma. The analysis demonstrates that coerced religious experiences became life-giving when four conditions interacted: the exercise of agency, coming to be situated within a safe space, corrective embodied experience, and the naming of these experiences as God’s presence. By listening to their lived experiences, this project proposes a pastoral theology of Salim that recognizes children and young adults as theological agents, articulating grace as it emerges in borderland spaces.
“Young people are not the future of the church. We are the church now.” This proposal is based on the Young People and Christian Worship (YPCW) study, a mixed-methods, multisite, binational, and ecumenical research project that listens deeply to how teenagers and emerging adults (aged 13–29) experience public Christian worship (95 qualitative interviews, 25 focus groups representing approximately 215 participants, and participant observation at 45 worship services, alongside a 1,420-person national survey). Rejecting problematic deficit frameworks and instead engaging in collaborative constructive theology, we ask “What can we learn about worship from young people?” Our research addresses three distinct liturgical traditions—Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, and evangelical Protestant. Initial findings highlight holistic formation: young people are shaped by and for specific traditions of worship in multiple ways—intellectually, emotionally, and actively. What we are learning about formation is significant for the future/s of the church, and the church today.
Digital culture is a major factor in contemporary children’s lives. It shapes all aspects of their days, from education and relationships to free time and physical health. This paper will explore several ways that digital culture and artificial intelligence influence spiritual well-being and faith formation. It will suggest that digital experiences provide opportunities for kids to expand their spiritual horizons, make connections with diverse others, experiment with authentic identity formation, and engage in creative religious activities. It will also discuss how uncritical exposure to AI, excessive engagement with social media, and other problematic elements of digital culture pose threats to spiritual health, especially for children already at risk because of cultural marginalization and discrimination. Along the way, the paper will explore how faith formation practices can incorporate digital opportunities while teaching children how to resist digital threats.
Children of missionaries (often called missionary kids or MKs) occupy an understudied place in practical theology, despite their outsized influence on the theological academy and the church. This paper examines storytelling practices among MKs at a Christian summer camp, asking how these practices help MKs make theological sense of their cross-cultural lives. Drawing on ethnographic research, including participant observation and semi-structured interviews, it argues that the camp's formal and informal storytelling practices facilitate identity construction by immersing participants in a community of others who share similar experiences of migration and cross-cultural living. More specifically, MKs learn to interpret their own experiences by listening to other MKs narrate theirs, "apprenticed" by older peers into shared practices of meaning-making. The paper concludes by asking what kind of theological future becomes possible when we not only listen to young people's stories, but help them tell those stories well.