When I volunteered to teach my son’s elementary Sunday School class, I received login details to an online service from a large Christian publisher. When you log in, you can see videos, songs, and a full lesson plan produced by this company.
The lesson I was to teach was on The Widow’s Mite–a fantastic story. In short (and it is short), Jesus compares a lot of rich people who were giving a very small percentage of their money to the temple for show with a poor widow who gives a small amount of money, but it was all she had to give.
The online lesson followed the trend in pedagogy where you first have to identify a main theme to the story and then provide a real world application. Here’s what the lesson plan said:
Say: Jesus could tell that the poor woman was a giver when he saw what she did. He said she was a really great giver because she gave something that was important to her. Jesus loves givers.
Say: When we give, it doesn’t have to be money. We can be givers when we share something that’s special or important to us.
Wow, that was a quick turn! This is a classic move by the wealthy suburban white church. As soon as Jesus starts talking about money, pull a Don Draper and change the conversation so that it’s not really about money. The money the widow gave was equivalent to a teddy bear. Also notice how there’s no reflection on the rich people, even though that is what every child who hears this story at this church is.
Then there’s the music. Every week, my kids sit in front of a huge screen where they watch a beautiful and painfully diverse group of children, smile from exotic locations as they have fun singing songs that vaguely talk about the love of Christ.
Most people living in the suburbs outsource their children’s spiritual education to their churches. And now the churches are subcontracting to large publishers. Every time it gets passed on, the message gets watered down because it must appeal to the masses, and in the end it just reinforces existing safe beliefs–which is the exact opposite of the subversive teachings of Jesus.
This can be seen best in the “veggitization” of children’s biblical education. Biblical stories are carefully selected and converted into a safe, funny, and harmless versions, with a ‘moral’ lesson, whipped up with a lot of American humor, and sold to the masses.
Phil Visher, one of the founders of Veggie Tales, admits that “My initial goal was to see if I could make a film successfully. My secondary goal was, ‘If I can make a film, can I put Sunday School values in it?’ And that ended up going really, really well. My thought was that once I’ve established that and I have an actual studio, then I’ll take kids deeper.”
But that never happened. He later reflected, “Wait a minute, did I just spend 10 years persuading kids to behave Christianly without teaching them Christianity?”
(While I assume he is genuine in this, don’t miss the fact that he gave these quotes while promoting a new video series he had created.)
This is why children can spend 18 years attending the same church and finish high school knowing basically nothing about the Bible, its themes, or how the narrative it tells.
So then, what’s the best way to move forward? Just tell the stories–straight from the text, in groups small enough that they can ask questions and wrestle with what is going on. Tell the stories as whole books and not as a few verses here and there. Don’t skip over stuff you think isn’t interesting or above their ability to understand. Let them ask questions, and respond often with, “I don’t know, that’s a good question.” When you try to present a story without any mystery around it, you’ve lost the biblical narrative.
For a long time, my kids’ favorite story was Jesus’ parable about the tax collector and the Pharisee. That story cuts me to the heart. They like to hear it over and over again. I don’t even know why, but something about it touches them deeply too.
Don’t think of it as teaching kids the Bible. Just expose them to the stories and they will figure it out. Embrace the mystery and the strangeness. Don’t feel like you have to end the story with a clear application to their lives. Sometimes the story just needs to sit in your heart for a few years before it comes back up at the right time.
Whatever you do, don’t outsource it–let your kids hear it from you. Learn things together and let your children point out new things to you that you’ve never seen before.
Just tell the stories and see what happens.
Photo by Samantha Sophia on Unsplash
