a question for you - what do you do with kids at Sunday School on Christmas day?

Here's a question for you from my friend Meredith. 

She asks,

I'm wondering if anyone out there has some good ideas of things to do with kids at church on Christmas morning - not for a kids' talk in church but an activity to do with them when they go to their "Sunday School" space. 

It's not the easiest time. Often the kids are tired after a late "I couldn't get to sleep" night and an excited early start. Some have opened their presents and want to get back home to them and others have to wait until after church and so want it all to go very quickly. 

I'd be interested to hear what others have done (or what they have noticed their kids were doing while they were in church) on this day. The last couple of years I have made simple Christmas decorations - one to take home and put on the tree and one to give to someone in the congregation. 

I'd love to hear what others do.

Please comment here.

a good children's bible for older kids

Ah, yes, children's bibles. Love 'em or hate 'em, most Christian parents read them to their kids. If you've ever tried to buy one, you'll know how many there are!

Most are collections of bible stories picked with an eye to "things kids like and can relate to". These range from good to indifferent. You'll probably want a few on your shelf for different ages. I reviewed lots in this post (recently updated).

Some kids' bibles are more interpretative. They give kids a biblical theology - an overview of God's big saving plan - and show how every bible story points to Jesus, which is brilliant. There are two excellent bibles for younger children that fit this category - The Big Picture Story Bible and The Jesus Storybook Bible (I reviewed them here).

A couple of years ago, another children's bible was published that shows how every story is fulfilled by Jesus: The Gospel Story Bible. I've been reading it with Andy (7) and Thomas (10). The writing is clear but dense and the ideas challenging, and it's not highly readable - it's sometimes a little over Andy's head - so it's more suited to older children than the two I just mentioned; but it's still a good choice.

My friend Deb says, "It’s much meatier than most children’s bibles. It is not straight text – it is still a re-telling of the story – but it sticks closely to the text and doesn’t add in too many imaginative details." We read to our whole family from a complete bible too, but it's helpful for my younger children to hear the fuller story in an accessible format.

At the end of each story is a paragraph explaining how it's fulfilled in Jesus; these are mostly excellent. My kids particularly enjoy the 3 discussion questions that go with each story - a great way of revising the story and driving the point home. The pages are bright and glossy (a bit hard on these old eyes, but the kids love them!) and the pictures unusual and eye-catching.

So if you're looking for a children's story bible for ages 7-12, one that will show kids how every story points to Jesus, you might have just found it.

If you want to find out more, check out ...

my review of children's Bibles
Deb's review of children's bibles
this detailed review of the most popular interpretative children's Bibles

teaching our kids Two Ways to Live

The other day, my husband Steve told our four children to grab a piece of paper and a pen. Then he rolled out those old, familiar words: "God is the loving ruler of the world...".

We're teaching the gospel outline Two Ways to Live to our kids. Steve told them they'll get five dollars for every panel they get word-perfect. Actually, he wanted to give them one dollar, which says something about what a dollar was worth back when he was a child!

We figure that kids have great memories, so why not make the most of this by stuffing their heads with good things? And what better to fill their heads with than a simple gospel outline?

So far, our eight-, eleven- and thirteen-year-olds are word-perfect on the first panel. We're yet to see if the five-year-old can get his head around it. Although now I think about it, jelly-beans might be a better bribe reward for him than a five dollar note.

Oh, and we're getting the Two Ways to Live app on our daughter's iPod.

(By the way, please don't think our family is super-spiritual because I write about all the ways we teach our kids the Bible! We vary what we do from week to week and year to year. You'd never find us doing everything I've talked about in a single week. In fact, some days you won't find us doing anything at all!)

This post first appeared at The Briefing.

image is by Andy, age 5

reading the whole Bible to our children (4) guest post

Today Fiona gives some fantastic suggestions for practical ways to read the Bible with your kids. This is the final post in a four-part series: see the others here, here and here.

This might all still sound rather daunting! Let me tell you some of the strategies we’ve used to read the Bible to our own children at home on a daily basis.

• Use different formats at different times and at different ages. Alternate reading through a children’s Bible, and then a book of the full Bible.
• Illustrate the Bible reading yourself. For a few years, I drew rough figures in a scrapbook each evening. You don’t have to be a very good artist – stick figures will do! (Older children may like to do this themselves.)
• Get your kids to act out the Bible reading (this was great in books of the Bible where there was lots of fighting!!).
• Let children read aloud at times.
• Ask one of more of your children to ask one question about the passage, and to answer a question too.
• Give each child a sheet of paper and encourage them to draw an illustration to go with the passage.
• Make a simple worksheet to accompany the reading.
• Above all, persevere, even when there are evenings when you seem to be doing more yelling than Bible reading (“Quentin, stop touching Hamish! Rufus, would you sit down! Anna, don’t hum now ... Hamish, we’ll find your excursion form later … Rufus, would you SIT DOWN and KEEP STILL!”).

So just do it! Read the whole Bible to your children, and I hope you will feel often the delight and excitement that I feel when my children ask questions or make comments that show a growing understanding of God’s word.

image is by johnb2008 from flickr

reading the whole Bible to our children (3) guest post

What attitudes should we bring to the difficult parts of the Bible when we read them with our kids? Fiona answers that question today. You'll find the first part of this series here and the second part here.

So how do we deal with the particularly “difficult” books or passages in practice?

Firstly, don’t be afraid of them. Bear in mind that just because we (adults) find a passage difficult doesn’t mean that our children will find it difficult. They may be untroubled by the ethical issues that crowd our consciousness and the assumptions and prejudices that colour our understanding.

Don’t be afraid of letting your children know that you find some parts of the Bible difficult. God is so much bigger than we are that we should not be surprised when we sometimes find him hard to understand. Encourage our children to ask questions that we may not be able to answer straight away. Being a Christian doesn’t mean knowing all the answers, but it means clinging fast to the answers we do know.

Secondly, don’t be ashamed of the difficult passages. They are still God’s word to us, to teach us, rebuke us, challenge us, and help us grow. Are you worried about frightening children with gruesome stories, or exposing them to sordid sexual sin when they are too young, and thus shattering their innocence? While we need to be sensitive to our children, I am inclined to think that children can cope with more than we give them credit for, and I wonder what is the greater danger: disturbing our children with confronting Bible stories, or giving them an edited, saccharine, weak view of God?

Next, we need to work at understanding God’s word for ourselves, so that we can then communicate it better to our children. Read the Bible for yourself. Dip into some commentaries; read books that teach biblical theology. Even with daily Bible reading at home, you may need to think beforehand about the part of the Bible you will be reading to your children, and how to simplify and explain it.

Teaching God’s word to your children is a great way to learn more about God’s Word yourself! I have often had new insights into the Bible through reading it to my children, both because I have to explain it to them, and also through their comments and questions.

Next week: some practical suggestions for reading the hard bits of the Bible with kids.

image is by johnb2008 from flickr

reading the whole Bible to our children (2) guest post

Here's the second part of Fiona's article about reading the whole Bible with our children. You'll find the first part here.

In particular, I am convinced that reading all of the Bible helps our children (and us!) to understand the reality and seriousness and ugliness of sin. We live in a cultural context which has greatly undermined the idea of sin (it’s not our fault, it’s the fault of our genes/parents/educational system/government/mental illness/etc).

(As an aside, I think reading the Bible is a great tool for sex education! When my son asks, “What is a prostitute?”, my answer can lead to great discussion about the right context for sex, about misuse of God’s good gift, and how sex shouldn’t be used to buy acceptance or money or popularity, but to cement a relationship that already exists. The Bible makes it clear that many people do not obey God’s laws about sex. The Bible gives us a beautiful picture of the beauty of sex and the context (marriage) in which it should be enjoyed; but it also shows us the destructiveness and shamefulness of sexual immorality, as well as God’s forgiveness and restoration of sinners.)

Reading the whole Bible also teaches us about the wrath of God (another unpopular concept today). God is holy and righteous, and thus hates sin and evil. Uncomfortably, the Bible teaches that it is God himself who often brings disaster, on his enemies, or even on his own people (think of the Flood, for example; 2 Kings 17, especially verses 18, 20; Amos 3:2 and chapter 4; Revelation). God is not just our Saviour, but our Judge. God is the one who destroys as well as the one who saves. God is not a weak, benevolent God who wants to be our friend, but a passionate, powerful, majestic, terrifying God. Read the whole Bible, and let your children learn that God is to be feared as well as loved! For example, when we read Lamentations to our children recently, and asked what this book taught us about God, they said things like, “Angry. Punishing. Fierce. Merciful. Keeps his promises to punish as well as save”. These are important theological insights!

My hope is that my own children, those I teach in Sunday School, and those I teach in Scripture classes at school, will understand that God is not someone whom you can take or leave, as it suits you; and that what matters is not so much what you think of God, but what God thinks of you.

Next week Fiona will talk about the practicalities of dealing with the particularly “difficult” books or passages with our children.

image is by johnb2008 from flickr

reading the whole Bible to our children (1) guest post

A couple of weeks ago I posted a question for you about reading the Bible with kids - even the hard bits: should we read the gory or sexual bits of the Bible to children? Well, my friend Fiona McLean has taken pity on me and written a response! (You'll also find an interesting discussion in the comments here.) In the first of four posts, Fiona says,

I have some sympathy for this question, because quite a lot of the Bible does seem difficult: boring, irrelevant, confronting, offensive, violent, or sexually explicit. So why am I still convinced that we should not only read all of it ourselves, but also read it to children - our own at home; and other people’s children, in Sunday School, at conferences, and even in Scripture classes at school?

Firstly, if we were to avoid all the “difficult” bits of the Bible, there wouldn’t be much left! This applies to the New Testament as well as the old: think of Jesus, the Warrior King, slaying his enemies (Revelation 19:11-21); or Jesus, at his second coming, “in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God” (2 Thessalonians 1:8); or the servant who is “cast into the outer darkness” where there “will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 25:30).

In fact, someone of our favourite and most comfortable Bible passages may be a lot more “difficult” than we realise, especially if you are only familiar with the sanitised version in children’s Bibles. (Children’s Bibles can be very helpful, but they are not the Bible itself: they are always summaries and paraphrases; they are necessarily selective about what they include; and they are an interpretation.) Noah and the Ark is not just about God saving Noah and his family and lots of cute, cuddly animals, but about the great wickedness of mankind, as a result of which God sent a Flood which drowned every other person and animal (Genesis 6-8). We like the story of the boy Samuel being called by God, but we forget that God called him so that he could pass on the terrible news that Eli’s rebellious sons were under sentence of death from God for their blasphemy and iniquity (1 Samuel 3:11-14). When you tell the story of David and Goliath, do you mention that David cut off Goliath’s head (1 Samuel 17:51)? The story of the Good Samaritan includes a violent attack on a man which nearly killed him, and which left him wounded and half-dead in the street (Luke 10:30). The Prodigal Son squandered his money on prostitutes and reckless living (Luke 15:13). Even the sweet Nativity story, unedited, includes the terrible murder of all the baby boys in Bethlehem (Matthew 2:16). The Bible is full of “difficult bits”!

Secondly, I wonder what we mean by “difficult bits” anyway? Do we mean parts that are boring or seem irrelevant? Ideas that don’t fit in with our worldview – that seem harsh, that present God as cruel and vindictive or arbitrary? If so, perhaps it is our worldview that needs to change, our understanding of God that needs to grow to fit the reality of the God who has revealed himself to us.

Thirdly, even without the Bible there are “difficult bits” in life. There is much that is sordid and violent and nasty in the world around us: tsunamis, pornography, child abuse, cancer, infertility. Where is God in all this? Is he absent? Capricious? Vindictive? Powerless? Our children (and ourselves) are going to be exposed to these disturbing and difficult issues through the media, billboards, DVDs, newspapers, and television. As believers, let’s see what God’s perspective is on these things, and grapple with these difficult questions within the framework of a biblical worldview.

This is why, instead of just reading nice, comforting, somewhat insipid children’s Bibles, my husband and I read the whole Bible to our children. We believe and trust that the Bible is God’s word to us, and to our children (e.g. Deuteronomy 29:29). We want our view of God and of ourselves and of our world to be shaped more by God’s Word than by the culture around us.

Tune in next week for Fiona's next thoughts.

image is by johnb2008 from flickr

a question about reading the Bible with kids – even the hard bits

There was an interesting comment on my post Reading the Bible with kids - even the hard bits.

A mum who’s thinking about how to read the Bible with her family said, “I’d love to see a follow up article about tackling the other types of difficult passages of the Bible – the particularly gory or sexual bits.”

I’ve been giving some thought to this, and I hope to write something in response; but I’m interested to hear your thoughts first, since I think different people will rightly handle this in different ways.

I think there are two important issues:

• how do we deal with these passages with our own children?


• how do we deal with these passages with other people’s children, for example, when teaching Sunday School?

What do you think?

You can comment here or at The Briefing.

reading the Bible with kids - even the hard bits

The first chapter of Ezekiel (let’s be honest) is some kind of weird. A wind drives an immense storm cloud from the north; four glowing creatures emerge from the cloud, each with four different faces, with two wings covering their bodies and two spread out, darting to and fro with a sound like roaring waters; wheels within wheels, one for each creature, their rims covered in eyes, move in a straight line wherever the four creatures go; and above the creatures’ wings is an expanse like crystal, surmounted by a sapphire throne on which sits a human figure, glowing like metal in a furnace.

It’s a vivid, startling passage, and the kids’ faces are rapt. Mine too. We read Revelation a year or so ago, and the echoes and allusions are clearer than I’ve ever seen them, so much so that we all pick them up, even our eight year old.

It’s at times like this that I understand why the Puritans called the home a ‘little church’. As we sit here, the four kids and I, listening to my husband Steve read the Bible, it all falls into place. It’s completely casual, and I reckon just about anyone could do it, because all you have to do is to open a Bible, read a passage, and talk about it.

We use the same method my parents used with my brother and me after dinner, back in the day when their Presbyterian church, faithful to its Puritan heritage, taught them that it’s the parents’ responsibility to teach their kids about God. Here’s how we do it:

• We take it in turns to read a book of the Bible, which leads to some pretty random choices, most recently Revelation, 1 and 2 Samuel, Acts and Ezekiel.
  
• We read a chapter a night (the nights when we do it, that is). Mostly the adults read, but sometimes the older children.
• Each member of the family gets to choose whether to ask or answer a question, even our five year old, whose questions tend to be simple multiple choice: ‘Did Ezekiel see: a. a cloud, b. a mountain, c. a goose?’. If they ask a question, the rest of the family gets to answer it.
• We pray about what we read.1

See? I told you it was easy. So easy that it doesn't matter who's at our dinner table: we can invite them to join in.2 So easy - and yet so challenging - that it suits our whole family, with ages ranging from five to thirteen to forty-four.3

Of course, there’s a little more to it than that. When it comes to Ezekiel, it helps that Steve wrote some Bible studies on it a few years ago. When we’re confused, we ask him to explain, and he does, not in a preachy way, but just because we’re interested in what it all means. If this takes a little preparation, why shouldn’t parents put this kind of effort into teaching their children; or perhaps open a commentary and find the answers together? But mostly there’s no preparation, just us and the Bible.

We don’t read the Bible together every night. But it happens often enough for our kids to begin to realize that they can read and understand the Bible for themselves. Thomas, who’s eight, started out not really listening or concentrating (his questions were limited to the last verse of the passage or to the fascinating topic of death and destruction - ‘Why did so-and-so die/kill/maim so-and-so?’). These days, he takes in most of the passage and asks or answers intelligent questions.

As we chat about Ezekiel's vision, we nut out some of the weird imagery:

• the eyes - God sees everything
• the wheels, like the wheels of a chariot, moving in all directions - God can go anywhere
• the four faces, each ruler of a different sphere (the man over the creatures, the lion over wild animals, the ox over tame animals, and the eagle over the sky) - God rules everything


• the 'expanse' - eleven-year-old Ben chips in here and says it means ‘God is above them and better’ and his Dad says, ‘Yep’
• the glowing figure on the throne - eight-year-old Thomas exclaims, ‘It’s Jesus!’ (see, I told you we've been reading Revelation)4

Now we’re all getting it.

When Ezekiel sees this vision, he's with the exiles in Babylon. We know what that means, because we’re all familiar with the Boney M. song River of Babylon, one of the songs on the retro playlists Steve inflicts on us in the car. He asks what the vision means, and Ben answers, ‘That God is there and that he loves them.’ Spot on!5. God is all-powerful, he sees everything, and he's everywhere, even with the exiles in Babylon. What seemed a bizarre and unsettling vision is now full of comfort.

Steve sums it up with words that haunt me for days: ‘God is there even in the bad things.’

I go away more encouraged than after many church meetings I’ve been to. No, scrap that. This is a church meeting, a gathering of God's people – one that any family or bunch of people can have in their home. All you need is a Bible, and a willingness to open it and ask questions. As you do this, especially if you don't skip the hard bits, you realize that, yes, the Bible is understandable, and anyone can read it. You begin to see how it all fits together. You learn that it's exciting and life-changing. Best of all, you get to know Jesus.

Any family or household can do that!


1. If this method doesn't appeal to you, you'll find some excellent ideas and resources in Sandy Grant's article Bible reading with kids.
2. Although we don't necessarily ask our visitors to jump straight into Ezekiel: when our neighbours shared a meal the other day, we asked if they would mind joining in our after-dinner Bible reading, and read half a chapter of Mark with them. We didn't make them ask or answer questions, although their son volunteered better answers than ours did!
3. That said, our five year old is more in the learning-to-concentrate rather than the taking-everything-in category, so we read a children's Bible with the little ones at bedtime while the older kids and adults do their own Bible notes: not everything is age-transferable!
4. Actually, it's 'the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD' (Ezekiel 1:28); what Thomas is picking up on is how the description of Jesus in Revelation 1:12-16 draws on Old Testament visions of God's glory, such as Ezekiel chapters 1, 9 and 43 and Daniel chapters 7 and 10.
5. Although we're about to learn that God's presence in exile has as much to do with judgement as salvation as we read the first half of Ezekiel, something we could have guessed from the lightning cloud; we'll get to God's salvation in the second half of the book.

This post first appeared in The Briefing last Friday.

image is a detail of Michelangelo's Sistene Chapel ceiling

how do kids understand who God is? - wrap up

I've been enjoying this discussion about how kids understand who God is - thanks, everyone! Here's my own answer to the question 'How do kids understand who God is?', with a little help from my friends.

1. We don't talk down to kids (although we talk as simply and clearly as possible). We tell them what they - and we - don't really understand, but which we know is true because God's word, the Bible, tells us so: for example, that God is a spirit (he's invisible, but he's real and he's everywhere); that he's the 'Trinity', one God in three persons; that he loved us enough to send his Son to die in our place ... And then, as they grow, they grow into our answers (but never to completely understand them, and that's good too).

2. Isn't it the same with lots of things we tell our kids? We tell them the world is round and wherever you stand on it, you're standing the right way up - something my 7 year old is completely confused about and asks me about all the time!!! We tell them many things we know are true and they (and we) don't fully understand. You don't need to completely understand something to know it and trust it, often because you trust the source it came from (which leads to my next answer...).

3. The very best answer for anyone is always one that takes them back to Jesus and the Bible, because that's where we want to direct our attention. In the end, we trust and serve God not because we understand him, but because we see him clearly in his Son (his life, death and resurrection) and in the Bible (his revealed word about himself). That's where all of us, Christian or non-Christian, adult or child, come to know and trust in God. Which is why we open the Bible with our kids and introduce them to Jesus, who is bigger than we will ever understand.

4. None of this would mean much without our example, as our friend from Tasmania wrote:

As preschoolers (my experience so far!) I think my kids realise that I believe God is real, so they do too. My two-year-old talks to God because I do. My four-year-old is excited that Jesus is alive because I am. They don't really understand - but of course I don't really understand either. He is someone we don't see, but who loves us. We talk about God because He is a part of our lives. And we answer their questions as best we can.

5. Bec pointed out something I hadn't thought of before: not only do we set a good example for our children by our lives, but we embody truth for them. Kids learn in concrete ways. They learn about God's fatherhood as they experience human fatherhood. They learn about the marriage between Christ and the church as they observe our marriage. They learn about grace as they experience a relationship of grace with us.

6. In the end, as Gordon said, the problem isn't one of understanding (for we will never fully comprehend our great God) but of hearts that reject his truth. Only God's grace can open our children's hearts and help them to know and trust in him. So we lead our kids to God's word, we explain his truth to them, we live out our faith before them - but, most importantly, we pray for them.

Lots of helpful answers! Thanks, friends.