Helping children to share their faith
The slogan at the top of the Hope 08 website is ‘do more, do it together, do it in word and action’. Words and actions go hand in hand. However, as we begin 2008 – a Year of Hope, we are thinking about what it means for children to ‘do more, do it together’ and to ‘do it in word’. To put it another way, how can we help the children in our care to explain their faith to their friends and peers in a clear and jargon-free way?
In this article, I will share two ways that children can use words to share their faith with others, the first is to tell their own faith story and the other is to be confident to ask and answer questions about their faith.
The most important point of all to emphasize, however, is that as followers of Jesus we are his ambassadors to the children we work with and to the people around us. It is therefore vital that, whenever we share our faith with others, we act with grace, kindness and good manners and do not dishonour Christ in our conduct. We should combine a good understanding of our faith in Jesus with a character that shows that the Biblical truths we describe are authentic, life-changing and a message of hope for everyone.
Telling my faith story (all children)
Sharing our own stories is a very safe way to share hope with the people around us, but how can we do this? If you had to explain your faith journey so far in one minute, what would you say? It takes some thinking, doesn’t it! Thinking through how we would succinctly explain why we believe in Jesus can be a very consolidating experience for us, and it can be for children, too.
I wonder if you have ever asked the children you work with who Jesus is and what he means to them? Listening to them share why they believe in Jesus can be a very moving, humbling and powerful experience. Encourage them to tell you and each other their stories. Some points to include in telling their story could be significant people, important times and their thoughts and feelings about Jesus.
Maybe you could ask for one volunteer a week to share their story - you could take the first turn! Alternatively, you could use a book like Stories of everyday Saints to start a discussion about what people believe and how it affects what they do, finishing with ‘what I believe and why I believe it’.
Asking questions (7s +)
I don’t know if you’re like me, but every time I get a new pen the first thing that I do when I take it out of its packaging is take it to pieces to see how it works and then put it back together again. Explaining the hope that faith in Jesus brings can be very much like this as well. As we ask questions of it ourselves, we learn to explain it and work out what it means for others around us. It can be the same for children. How then can we encourage children to ask honest and real questions about God and trust him without undermining their faith? How can we help the children to answer these questions and the questions that their friends may have?
Just giving the children I work with permission to ask big questions has been a liberating experience for them, and I try to model the kind of questions that are good to ask, such as ‘How do we know?’, challenging them not just to accept the ‘right/Sunday school answer’ but to think through what the Bible says and what they really believe. This has brought about good discussions and some very profound thinking from them.
Before we ask big questions, however, we need to work out where our answers are going to come from. The foundational questions of all the discussions that we have are:
Q: What/who is our ultimate authority when we are looking for answers about God?
A: God is (otherwise he wouldn’t be God!)
Q: How does God usually tell what he thinks about things?
A: Through the Bible.
Q: How do we know that this is true?
A: Faith that God is right.
Q: Where does this faith come from?
A: God gives it to us (Ephesians 2:8-9).
This is a very simple, yet difficult idea for us to understand – very often children are far more accepting that we are as adults (see Luke 18:17)!
Here are some questions that we could be asking with our children. If you click on the question, you will see references to useful Bible passages. Why don’t you have a go at asking these questions with your children and let them lead the discussion? I would want to emphasize, however, that for children and adults alike answers like ‘I’m not sure’, ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I haven’t thought about that yet’ are valid and often thoughtful answers.
Why should I tell other people?
Why doesn’t everyone follow Jesus?
A great way to manage this practically might be to have a seven-minutes-‘Asking big questions’-time at the end of your children’s group, when you sit all the children together and pull a question out of a hat. You could structure it in the following way:
- 1 minute time for quiet thinking
- 2 minutes to chat with a partner
- 2 minutes to listen to what we think
- 2 minutes to find out what the Bible says. (For this you could have the passages printed out and either read them through as a whole group or give smaller groups of children a passage each to read through and find a possible answer.)
In whichever way we choose to talk with children and encourage them to talk about their own faith journeys, let’s pray that we would enjoy listening to each other and celebrating what God has done and is doing in our lives.
Some resources that may help you in your thinking are:
From the Ground up
Fired up, not burned out
Stories of Everyday Saints
Welcome to the Lord’s Table
