The Wonder Summit Will Reimagine Worship and Prayer With Children

The Wonder Summit: Reimagining Congregational Worship and Prayer with Children will take place November 4 through November 6, 2026, at Lake Junaluska Conference and Retreat Center, 91 North Lakeshore Drive, Lake Junaluska, North Carolina. Created through the Western North Carolina Conference’s Cultivate Grant, the summit is designed to gather United Methodist leaders from across the Southeastern Jurisdiction while welcoming the wider church conversation about children in worship. The event’s central question is practical and theological: what changes when children are treated as full members of the worshiping community rather than spectators waiting for an adult version of church? Official descriptions identify clergy, worship leaders, children’s ministers, laity, and congregational teams as the intended participants. The program will include worship, speakers, and workshops focused on creative congregational worship and prayer. A current Western North Carolina Conference notice, published October 1, emphasizes that the gathering will help leaders imagine, practice, and examine the theology behind involving children. It also describes the summit as a collaborative space where pastors, children’s ministry leaders, and worship planners can exchange ideas, stories, and practices to take back to their churches. Registration is currently open, with the conference notice giving an October 15 registration deadline. Lake Junaluska’s own calendar confirms the November 4–6 dates and classifies the event under spiritual renewal. This combination of denominational sponsorship, retreat-center setting, and hands-on workshop design makes the summit more than a children’s-programming conference. Its focus is the shared worship of the whole congregation and the spiritual formation that happens when children are trusted to pray, sing, listen, respond, lead, and participate alongside adults.

Many churches care deeply about children yet unintentionally separate them from the practices that form Christian identity. Age-specific ministries can offer safety, teaching, friendship, and developmentally appropriate learning, but separation becomes a problem when children rarely experience the language, sacraments, prayers, music, Scripture, and intergenerational relationships of congregational worship. The Wonder Summit invites church teams to examine that gap without assuming that every congregation must adopt the same model. A small rural church, a large suburban congregation, and a multilingual urban ministry will have different spaces, volunteer capacities, traditions, and pastoral concerns. The useful question is not whether children can sit quietly through a service designed only for adults. It is how the church can plan worship in which children’s presence and participation are expected, meaningful, and rooted in Christian theology. Participants can prepare by observing a typical service before they travel: where are children seen, heard, invited, or ignored? They can note the moments that already welcome participation and the barriers that make worship confusing or inaccessible. Bringing a small team—a pastor, worship planner, musician, and children’s ministry leader—may make it easier to test ideas after the summit because responsibility does not rest on one person. Workshops and shared worship can then become a laboratory for practices such as child-accessible prayers, intergenerational Scripture response, visual and tactile elements, mentoring, and age-conscious preaching that still respects the whole congregation. The practical reason to attend is to leave with tested ideas, theological clarity, and collaborators who can help a church move beyond occasional children’s moments toward a culture where baptized children are recognized as active participants in the worshiping body of Christ.