In the past several weeks, kids in 4th-6th grade have learned how worries are like balloons, how holiness is and isn't like fruit hanging from a tree, and how salvation is like the adoption of an orphan. They learned how Esther was "in the right place at the right time", and how Paul showed that God uses unlikely people to fulfill his plan. But I deliberately misuse the word "learned" here. We teachers are fond of talking about "what we've learned" when they really are referring to "what was said". The learning depends on how the message is received and what's done with it after it's been spoken. And that is where the little half-sheet called the HomePage comes in.
We started distributing the HomePage almost three years ago. As stated at the top of each one, its mission is to give parents a jumping-off point for spiritual discussions with their pre-teen, and to serve as a communications link between the 4th-6th grade ministry and the families that we serve." Which is a fancy way of saying the page is one side announcements, one side discussion fodder. Here are some suggestions on why and how to use it.
Why discuss? Why not just tell on a Sunday morning and leave it at that? To understand that, we have to understand how teaching and learning intersect. Many people think that to teach effectively, the transmission of true information is sufficient. Transmitting ideas and information that are true is important, but it is not sufficient, not if you want to achieve the kind of alleigance and buy-in that transforms learners into thinkers and doers. Even on a rote level, kids will not remember most of what they've heard unless it is rehearsed. Of course, we can and should do better than rote. As religious educators we are constantly touching on themes like what it means to be human, to encounter the divine, to give our own lives away, to experience redemption. This demands far more of kids than having them mimic things or nod in assent - it must reach into their every day existence where contradictions between what is known to be true and what is actually lived as though it were true are exposed and reckoned with.
Every good Bible teacher knows this - you don't just teach the Bible for the sake of knowing the facts of the stories; you teach it because you believe the text still speaks today, that its message has some claim on the lives of the hearers, and you want to help them unearth it. Bound up in the idea of a "living and active" word of God is its ability to gnaw at us, to challenge us, to carry with us away from the setting where we received it. Spiritual truth transforms because it endures. We can try to escape the idea that humans are fallen, but we keep running into the reality. We can harbor fantasies of self-redemption, but those fantasies continually crumble.
So we must get learners to ponder, to re-visit, to digest and process ideas that are new if they are to internalize them. "Discussion" carries a threatening connotation to some people because they fear it's an invitation to relativism: if we "discuss" the idea that Jesus is the only way to God, we're opening the door for competing understandings and "that's your truth" kinds of sentiment. But that's not the kind of discussion I'm endorsing. Christian discussion starts with truth and grapples with it, resolving discrepancies, understanding implications, acknowledging difficulties, compensating for our own unbelief. That's healthy, and if done well, facilitates the process of integrating truth into our being. We want people - children included - to be about the work of reconciling the "official theology" with their own, personal, "vernacular" (that is, their "walking around") theology.
How to do it. With this purpose in mind, then, you should approach spiritual dialogue with your kids as a chance both to hear their heart and to share yours. I like the prescription that appeared in Children's Ministry Magazine just this month, urging parents to have spiritual discussions ALOT with their kids: "A" stands for "Ask how your child feels about the topic", "L" stands for "Listen without interrupting", "O" stands for "Open your heart (and your Bible if you need to)", and "T" stands for "Talk about your thoughts and feelings on the subject - and how they're shaped by God's Word." This simple acronym reminds you to let kids speak first and to share with - not lecture to - them.
Resist the urge to turn spiritual discussions into quiz sessions. Kids are keen to understanding when adults are hunting for "just right" answers, and they'll give them if they know it will get them out from under the microscope. For another thing, I don't think spiritual growth comes from regurgitating volumes of facts. To simply quiz a child about content is frustrating for you and for them and in any case does not invite them to engage in the kind of processing that connects head and heart. To this end, most of the questions on the HomePage are open-ended. A parent doesn't have to have been present for the message in order to participate in the dialogue. (Although if your kid is totally lost, an outline is available most weekends at http://surgenotes.blogspot.com/).
Express interest, both in what your child is learning and in what they're saying about it. Scan over the half-sheet before you begin so you're familiar with the main idea and the direction of the discussion. What are your own thoughts on the subject at hand? What do you wonder about? What do you wish you know, but didn't? Don't feel that you have to have all the answers, but give your child instead a sense that adults, too, grapple with applying Christian truth to life. If the topic of the week is why we should love our enemies, yes, it's good for kids to know that Jesus said it and that it comes from the Sermon on the Mount. But how much more powerful for them to hear their mom or dad talk through how they've struggled to love someone who's difficult, and what they did to persevere through it? You want, with spiritual discussion, to establish a climate not of spiritual perfectionism (because we're not) but of honesty and openness, where children and adults alike can narrate the process of living out their faith.
You'll get the best results if you spiritually dialogue with your kids regularly - that is, at the same time and in the same place, and do it every week. It may take time for your kids to trust that they really can say anything and that you're not just checking up on them to reward whether they were listening or not. Keep in mind that often when adults ask kids questions it's so that they can judge them: "Is your homework done?" "Did you clean your room?" "Have you practiced piano today?" "What's the capital of Delaware?" I'm convinced this is why most kids aren't comfortable conversing with adults, because they take what's meant to be a conversation starter (like, "What did you do today?") as the beginning of a line of interrogation. There may be times when you'll use questions in that way; but not during spiritual talks. You can "warm your kids up" to dialogue by making it an informal practice to ask them what they think about all kinds of things. This will pave the way for sharing of the stuff that really matters later on.
A caution: the older kids get, the more reticent they are to share spiritual insights? Why is this? Researchers David Hay and Rebecca Nye believe it may have to do with how adults react. Hay and Nye, in their work with school-aged children, found it difficult to get older kids to trust them enough to talk about spiritual things. Not only does "Right!" tend to curttail what kids will offer up (because it puts them in quiz mode), but adult responses that are overly gratuitous or that value the "cuteness" of what a child says rather than dignifying it tend in the long run to discourage kids from opening up. In other words, take kids and their contributions seriously. I so valued a camp conversation I once had with a boy who told me he'd looked up to the sky and seen a face that looked like Satan's scowling, and then another face that looked like God's, smiling. Our natural skepticism can easily dismiss or challenge his perception - from "Yeah, right" to "How does he know what Satan and God look like?" - but for me it was a window into his soul and a gateway to discussing spiritual reality that we wouldn't otherwise have had.
Kid learners aren't adult learners, and our goal shouldn't necessarily be to make them into that. With development will come the ability to sit still for longer periods, to think in highly abstract ways, to relate a speaker's experiences to our own, to expand their vocabulary. Our job is to work with what we've got, and at this age (every age, really), revisiting what was taught and inviting kids to reprocess is vital. We can, and should, put lots of effort into teaching. But we should never assume that a lesson well-organized, well-illustrated, and well-delivered will equal well-learned. To discern that, we must get inside kids' heads to see if what we meant to communicate made it through in the translation. And there's only one way to find out.
Info, articles, and thoughts for parents of kids at North Coast Calvary Chapel.
