My Crazy Idea

I'm looking for a few good men. And women. And children. For a very simple experiment in promoting the spiritual lives of kids.

As one who works with children and families in a Christian context, I have an interest in promoting Bible literacy. I believe in the power of the Bible to shape people, and I wish more people would read it and I wish more people would understand it. To that end, we've offered a "Stumped by the Bible" class this spring (which is being re-tooled for rollout again in the Fall), taken time in our class to show off new Bible products, written about those products in this space, and searched high and low for the most appropriate translation we could find at a reasonable cost. (What we found was The Illustrated New Testament, a gem of a Bible, available from www.biblesplus.com.) We get kids to open the Bible every weekend, we teach from it, and we send home discussion pages with at least one question that is directly related to the meaning and application of a verse or passage.

I know firsthand how the Bible can spur spiritual growth. Yet as much as I believe in personal Bible study, I know most Christians don't read it - and that certainly goes for kids, too. It's too hard, too boring, takes too much time, or found to be not impactful. Some kids are reading from adult translations. Many just don't know where to read. And, their reading skills are still developing. They get grace for the fact that they can't readily interpret texts that are 2,000+ years old.

As I wrestled with, and continue to wrestle with, the question of how to make our kids Bible-literate, I happened to attend the seminar by Marcia Bunge at Bethel Seminary in San Diego, where she presented 10 best practices for promoting spiritual development in children. First on the list: Reading and discussing the Bible and interpretations of it with children.

Could it really be that simple? Can we really launch kids on a path of Bible understanding, Bible reverence, and Bible living just by taking the time to read it to them, out loud, regularly? Parents will sometimes ask for recommendations of devotional books to use, or that their pre-teen son or daughter might have for themselves. What if the answer is, simply, "The Bible", read out loud over and over again?

So I'm looking for a few good men, women, and children, to take a 30-day challenge. The assignment is to endeavor to read aloud from the Bible to your children every day for a month. I want to know if it's practical. If it's workable. If it's palatable to kids. And you have to discuss, as Bunge said, meanings and interpretations with kids. By "discuss" it means that you distinctly don't bring an outline or notes to the devotion time - that's a sermon. Discussion is collaborative. To discuss "interpretations" is to acknowledge that the Bible has a rich history of varying interpretations, and that fact doesn't cheapen God's word in any way, but only reflects the fact that people have thought seriously about it for a good long time and serious thinkers have raised questions without definitive answers. You need to get comfortable in that territory of what we don't know because it's exactly those things that make the Bible intriguing and worth thinking about. One of the tragedies of Sunday school is the way we answer every question so neatly and perfectly, oh-so-carefully tying up every loose end, so that the mystery of God is extinguished. God is not simple, but wonderfully complex. Whenever I hear a kid preface a question with, "There's something I don't get about God…" or "I've been thinking about that…" I know they're developing some depth of understanding. I love that.

What would you read? That's up to you. Obviously anyone who takes this on will want to complete the 30 days, so there will be some trial and error with which books and passages you choose. Proverbs is simple. So is James. Romans is harder. Gospels are great, and don't always lend themselves to common-sense interpretation. Or, try some OT history - Kings and Chronicles. But whatever you choose, the goal is to create an uninterrupted time that happens regularly. (The amount of time you read each day will vary based on the age of your kids, and other factors.)

The only other requirement is that you keep a journal, which we'll give you, that records what happened each day, and then that you write a summary reflecting on the experience at the end of the 30 days.

Now, an important, and necessary, distinction. My desire is to promote living in the Book, not by the Book. When we live in the Book, we recognize our own place in God's story. We see the Bible as history, yes, but also as a story that continues to this day - the story of God's interaction with mankind. We see there stories of faith and yes, virtue, but the Bible is not primarily a collection of moral tales. But there are plenty of characters we wouldn't want to emulate, and the story is richer for them, despite their moral lapses. The tendency is to use the Bible with children only as a tool of character formation, leading to kids' perceptions that it's a catalog of do's and don'ts. The old cannard that "Bible" stands for "Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth" is cute, but not helpful to kids. Living by the Book breeds legalism. Living in the Book reminds us why we're alive.

Let's see what this does. School's getting out soon, summer looms on the horizon, life is busy...which makes this a perfect time to try. Martin Luther once said of prayer that when he felt like he was too busy to spend an hour in devotion he immediately set aside what he had to do and spent two hours. Just the act of reading the Bible together could be as beneficial and transformative to your family as the content covered during that time.

Interested? Intrigued? Willing to try it? (Incidentally, it is impossible to fail at this, because even if you only manage to read 1 day out of 30, that will tell us something.) E-mail me and let me know you're on board, and I'll send you the journal. I'm looking for at least 10 families to try this, and evaluate after 30 days. You're invited to see what happens.