[3] In 2003, George Barna published the results of his research, showing that children were the most important population segment to minister to, as they were considered the most likely to absorb spiritual teaching due to developmental vulnerability.
[5] Barna wrote that "habits related to the practice of one's faith develop when one is young and change surprisingly little over time", and that "the older a child gets, the more distracted and vulnerable he or she becomes" to what he described as "nonfamily influences".
The Lausanne committee published a paper[8] arguing that evangelists should target children under 14 in the global South for conversion, and created the Aim Lower[9] initiative.
[13] Dan Brewster, a director of World Vision, argued in a paper in 2005 that "The poor and exploited tend to be much more receptive to the Gospel", and that children and young people should be targeted in areas where disease, poverty and conflict have disrupted their lives.
The paper included basic ethical considerations, such as not evangelising children without parental consent, or where their families are entirely dependent on Christian charities for financial or material support, or in a way that disparages their local culture.
[22] Stewart has also criticised the efforts of politically conservative biblical literalists to convert young children to forms of Christian belief that advocate a literal reading of Old Testament narratives; in 2013, Stewart argued that biblical literalists teach children to read from the Old Testament in order to understand the divinely-ordered extermination of the Amalekites as used to justify genocide.