http://samluce.com/?p=2549

You’re absolutely right about story. I am such a huge believer in helping kids see the sweep of God’s story and their place in it. I’ve been really trying to reframe how I (personally) present God’s story to my own kids, how salvation fits in to that, and how they now participate in that story. I put together a summer curriculum a few years ago called “God’s Big Story” that tries to hit the highlights from Genesis to Revelation, to give kids an idea of the beautiful narrative we’re caught up in. I don’t want to minimize the importance of a child going through the Bible. But I think we agree that there are some parts that are just WAY too big for the expectations a lot of curriculum puts on our kids.

Great post, brother.

Yeah, I wondering if I’m going to get any pushback even on this post. You make a really good point about a desire to force feed the kids the whole Bible in a three year cycle when most adults aren’t doing it as well. These are the same people that accuse a seeker approach church of being an inch deep and a mile wide… which is precisely what you get when you try to cover the entire Bible in 2-3 years… just my opinion though.

Even in the context of this, I do see the value in wanting kids to push through the Bible. There’s something powerful when you see the entire context of the Bible as a redemptive story. One way I attempted to do this was in a discipleship group for 3rd-5th graders I had on Wednesday nights. We studied the New Testament but they were required to have a children’s storybook Bible as well (one of those designed for 4-6 year olds). They grumbled at first at the though of having a “baby Bible.” However, I talked to them about being able to read the entire Bible in a month or two during our study. They actually got fired up and started tearing through their Bibles on their own time… but that’s off subject.

We do use 252 and My First Look, so we’re relying on ReThink to refine our message to some degree. We will probably add a discipleship level at some point and in this, we’ll spend some time discussing what message we feel the kids most need to hear and understand.

It’s amazing the initial pushback you receive from parents and traditional Sunday-school type folks when they hear that last point; “All scripture is not equally applicable to every stage of life”. It’s a shock and horror look. So many churches have gotten into a mindset that they MUST plow through the Bible in one, two or three years. Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead! (Never mind the fact that many, if not most of our adults have never read the Bible through completely themselves).

We would never expect a kid to ingest and understand an engineering textbook by the time they graduated 3rd grade. Why would we expect them to do so with something so grand as our entire scripture!

This one principle takes so much weight off of us, and does so much to help our kids understand the “big things” about our God. Thanks!