How do we talk about God with kids?

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Welcome to Curiously Caitlin, where we try to make theology make sense. Usually, we take a kid question about theology, God, or the Bible, and find a scholar to answer it. But today, we are bringing you a slightly different conversation. I've heard from a lot of you that these episodes have not only helped you, a grown-up, learn about theology, our main goal, but they've also helped you have conversations with your kids or other kids you love about God. And my secret secondary goal has always been that this show would prompt people to volunteer with the kids in their church, or just strike up conversations with kids in church across a pew or at a potluck.

So we thought it would be fun to spend an episode not having a kid question, help grown-ups learn theology, but instead talking to an expert about how grown-ups talk to kids about theology. So today, we're talking with Dr. Scotty May. She is Associate Professor of Christian Formation and Ministry Emerita at Wheaton College, the author or co-author of many books, including Listening to Children on Their Spiritual Journey, and Nurturing Children's Spirituality, Christian Perspectives and Best Practices. Plus, she's Phil Vischer's mom.

I hope this conversation not only helps you think about how we talk to kids about God, but maybe also helps you rethink how you were taught about God, and how you might keep learning about God now.

And that's one of my favorite pieces of feedback we've gotten, is people saying, oh, now, when my kids ask a question, I want to start a conversation. I'm less scared of it. Or I've even had one person, this is my biggest goal, one person who said, oh, I, actually, I volunteer now in the children's ministry at my church, which, as someone who worked for years in children's ministry and spent a lot of my time just desperately calling people trying to get them to show up, I was very happy to hear that. Can you start by just telling us, how did you end up interested in how we teach kids about God? You have a lot of experience and study in this, but where did you get started?

We could talk, we could this kind of thing. And then I went to grad school and had my eyes opened up and I thought, wow, I understand now why I had that kind of an experience. It's not that what they were teaching me was worthless, but the way they did it made it useless to me. So it never clicked. It never changed me in any way, but I won all the prizes.

I was a great Bible quizzer. I won the sword drills, all of that kind of thing. And so it made me stop and think, what are we doing to children? that makes it that we don't have them encountering the living God? And so that's, in my mid forties, what made me shift into the area of focusing, how does the church impact children?

What difference does it make the kind of experience they have in the church? And so I did that kind of research for quite a while.

or that's not the version of that Bible story that I remember hearing.

Yes, they used the Bible and the Catechism. Those were the most readily available books in those days. But when that movement came to the US, we kept literary strategies and methods in how we went about it. So we focused on teaching the Bible rather than helping children experience God. And there's a huge difference between helping children encounter the living God through the story in the Bible rather than teaching the Bible.

And so one of the things that I have done, with the help of others that we've worked together, is to try and help children see that this story, God's story, is about real people at a real place in time, at a real point in time. And it's not about mastering the books of the Bible. It's not about any of that. Nothing wrong with that at all. But it's helping them encounter God and enter into His presence.

Even though they can't see God, they can feel the presence of God, even as young as two and three years of age. So that's what has shifted my emphasis. So here, again, maybe more than you want to know, one of the things that I have learned is that the power of language. And so, as long as we use the term Sunday school, we're going to have a mindset that we have to teach children. So when I've been working with children, we call it kids' community.

And we do Bible exploration, and we do kids' celebration when we work at worship. So we change the names. We don't use teachers as a term at all. We use shepherds, and we see the process of journeying together, rather than the teacher's going to answer your questions, the teacher's going to tell you the story. So it's been trying to introduce a whole different approach to helping children engage with God's story and also enter into His presence, encounter Him.

And I said, oh, they're going to church. And this kid said to me, this is church. And I said, you're right. I fully believe that. But I slipped so easily into the real things happening over there.

And what we're doing here is this other thing. Can you talk a little bit more about, for example, I'm imagining most people who, either to teach their kids or talk to their kids about God, ask questions about God with their kids, there's just things that seem really hard about talking about something that, like you said, can be kind of abstract or can feel very far away, or God isn't present to us in a way we can see or touch or feel. How would you describe stories in the Bible and ways that we might want to tell them to kids? Because the way that I grew up was this is information, and you might be quizzed on it, Awana style, right? Like, how many people went to this place?

or what's the order of events in this story? How would you describe, for people who want to talk about the Bible with their kids, in order for them to experience God, how they might do that?

that was way too big? How would you feel if you had that armor on? Helping them enter into the story through open ended questions, not content questions. I'm much less than knowing the whole content of the Bible. I want them to know the biblical story from creation and to the new creation and what needs to happen depending upon the age of the child.

So what do you include? Well, I think it's a helpful parallel to think about how you tell your child about sex. Do you tell the child the whole story right away? No, you don't tell them untruths, but you don't unfold every bit of it. I love the way what's in the Bible with Buck Denver does the whole biblical story and even the hard parts, but just in a way that a child, an elementary age child, can grasp it.

If I was working with an early childhood, I would even skip a little bit more of that, not to admit it, because it's bad, but it's the child's not ready for some of that yet. But I think for them to grasp the whole story is so important, much more so than the details of who did what.

Hosea is a pretty hard story to talk to my first graders with. Like. it was pretty. you basically, by the time you watered down the details so that it's appropriate for them, you basically don't have a story anymore that they can understand. So what people kept asking me to ask you was not only are there things we maybe shouldn't say, which it sounds like your answer is yes, there are some parts of these stories that might be appropriate for them when they're older, but even the parts that we might still want to tell, they might recognize some things in them that are hard.

For example, I said a few weeks ago on the show, I was teaching the Great Flood and Noah's Ark to some elementary school kids. And one of the kids asked me, were there just dead bodies lying on the ground when Noah and his family got out of the Ark? And I suddenly didn't know what to say. So, even if we're not telling them everything about the story, or there are certain stories that we're going to wait till they're older to tell them, there are some just hard things. What are some tips you might give people who spend a lot of time with kids in the Bible who are picking up on it, even if they're not hearing this specific story, they're picking up on violence, they're picking up on uncomfortable topics, whether it's instances of sex or sexual violence, or, if it's just, there's things that are hard to explain.

I don't know how to talk about the Trinity or I don't know how to talk about how God is powerful, but we also have choices to make. So, just in general, with hard things, what advice would you give to people?

So in the instance you just referred to, I think what I would maybe say is, what do you think it was like after the flood? What do you think might have happened? And then your answer can be, yes, maybe we don't really know, but that might be how it was. So I think, not coming across as declarative, with some of these answers, leaving it open for the child to wonder about it a little bit. And as the child gets older, they will change the form of their questions.

But responding to the question that they are asking, I think is really important. And it will also trigger thoughts from other kids. So there might have been another child in the room that would have said, oh, yeah, maybe. And so having it open and not being driven by the lesson plan can be so helpful.

I want them to be interested in this. But I don't know how to make that happen. And I'm actually worried if I try too hard to say, this is fine, you should do this, it might actually put them off.

And sharing what your struggles are, age appropriately. Wow, how would you help me when this hard thing happens? What would you say? And being a learner so that the child can teach in the childlike way, communication and dialogue and reciprocity between parent and child makes such a huge difference.

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Yeah, that's so helpful. I mean, I found, even in small ways, kids love knowing that they thought of something that is valuable to you. I love being able to tell the kids that I'm with in church, like you taught me something that was really helpful. I wouldn't have known that without you.

Interesting thing happened yesterday with my great granddaughter, who is seven and a half. Talk about when the child asked, she always goes with the family reunion on the 4th of July. And so yesterday, all of a sudden she said, what's the 4th of July? Why do we have that day as a special day? Well, when the child asked, she was very receptive.

So I think, sometimes creating environment where they can ask the questions that they're thinking about. I overheard both her and her little brother the other day talking about their dreams. And sometimes they have scary dreams. It opened up a wonderful opportunity to talk about how we can always know God is with us and how I know God is with me and what we can do to be sure to remember that kind of thing. So I think, taking God moments, we can create God moments, but also just taking advantage of them when they're there can be just so helpful for kids and for the.

they'll ask when it's been maybe 20 minutes after children's church. And we're just like, there's a potluck and we're hanging out. And a kid comes up and goes, I'm still thinking about Jonah and that whale, and I'm confused about this, or I wonder how Jonah felt in the whale. And it's like, oh, we needed to meet each other in a different way. It didn't need to just be in this one place.

Just showing that there are all ways of looking at some of these stories. But God is the hero of every story. And I think that is so important so that we don't make the mistake of making every biblical character the hero. That person did what they did because of God's work in their lives.

it seemed like the goal at the end was obey your parents or like do this thing, or. And there's a lot of stories that you have to really mess them up, kind of to turn it into a moral lesson at the end.

How do we have a different kind of approach to stories? where our impulse might be, let's find the moral lesson?

That's not the point. The point is, how did Daniel let God make him the man he is? How can I let Daniel make me the person that I am?

There's sometimes where I've seen some parents who go, oh, I don't want to do what I grew up with, so I'm going to do the opposite of that. Do you have any advice?

Do you read it like a dictionary or do you read it like Narnia? What difference does it make? Those kinds of things and help to show them that you read scripture differently. I never realized that, because it was always every word is true here. Well, I'm not saying it's not, but you read it differently.

So that would be one thing. The other thing, I would really do some hard searching about what things that I catch that became a method. For instance, ask Jesus into your heart. What does that mean? Where is that in scripture?

How do we have a life with Christ? How are we hidden in Christ? Those kinds of things. So, as an adult, start thinking through what did I catch? that may not be directly what the Lord Jesus would have us do to be in relationship with him.

And that can be tough.

Are there things like that, other things that you might want to point to us, of things that you wish we didn't teach kids, that we tend to teach kids in church?

You know, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Samuel and David. We know about David in Psalm 51, but have we ever looked at what David said in Psalm 22,, in Psalm 71,, where he says, from birth, you have been my God. I have always worshipped you. I've never heard a sermon on those passages, but on Psalm 51 all the time. And the one that really shocked me, of course, we all know about the unborn John the Baptist, everybody knows that story.

But in Galatians 1, verse 15, Paul says he was called by God before birth, by grace. Wow, Paul, look what he did later in life. Yes, but later God revealed himself through Christ to Paul. But Paul was called by grace before birth. And if we realize how scripture can help us shape our perception of the very young child and get over this, oh, they're born in sin and that fear, and realize that Jesus said, let the child come.

We don't have to lead the child. The child will come to Jesus because of the love of Jesus for the child. So those kinds of things have just really helped me have a deeper love and care for how I work with children.

And I would think, oh, I don't think that the idea I'd had before that you have to be grown up and have really understood what you're saying before you can really know Jesus. And now, all the time with kids, I'm like, wow, you get something about this that I wouldn't get otherwise. Are there times that you can think of where you've had that experience with a kid of, oh, my goodness, I've learned something from you, or you have really pointed to something I needed to hear?

So this brown, that's Jesus washing the disciples' feet. And over here, this is Jesus with Mary. And this is in every color and shape had a meaning to this child. And another one, this child drew a picture. There was a box and then colors rising up to the top was yellow.

And I said, can you tell me about this picture? I'd love to know what you're making. And he said, well, this is Jesus rising from the tomb. And went up to just this gorgeous yellow up at the top of the page, it was absolutely beautiful. Then, another time, I was sitting by my granddaughter, who at the time was maybe five or six, and she was getting restless in church.

And I said, well, would you draw me a picture? And she whispered, what should I draw? I said, well, draw me a picture of God. And so she spent the rest of the service with a pen drawing this picture of God. And at the end, I said, tell me about your picture, because she had drawn right down.

the middle, half of the picture was a boy with a crew cut and tennis shoes and shorts. Half of the picture was a girl with curly eyelashes, fingernail, polish and ballet slippers. I said, tell me what this means. This looks like a boy and this looks like a girl. And she said, yeah, that's right.

Because Jesus is neither or God is neither. And so she had grasped that God was more. And I was like, wow, that was really a neat thing for a five-year-old to depict.

I would like to introduce you to her. And it's amazing how much you can have a conversation. It doesn't have to be scary when we all just act like. these are people and they have thoughts about God that we need to be better Christians, too.

Not so the adults won't be distracted, so the child won't be embarrassed. What a whole different attitude that is when we have, like Jesus, put the child in the middle. When his disciples are saying, no, keep them away. Jesus put the child amidst the disciples and said, you become like this child.

And even says, I think this is so important, says, and how we respond to. that says something about how we respond to God, too. And I just like the first time they put it in the pews, I was like cheering in the back, like, yes, this is wonderful.

And we did that for about 15 years and they entered right into it. And they got to choose the kind of activity that they wanted. I think letting children choose is so helpful. It takes care of some of the learning differences that people have. If I have...

OK, now it's true confession time. I used to be a consultant and traveled around to churches, being 100 churches a year. And one of the things that I said in workshops was a child has an attention span of one minute per chronological year. And I said that over and over and over. Then I started doing this research with a different approach.

That was a lie. And so I've had to confess every chance I had. that is not true. The only reason it's true is when I, having them, do something that doesn't engage them or is irrelevant. Then the attention span is about one minute per chronological year.

But you do things with scripture that are engaging. And my four-year-old were drawing pictures for 45 minutes with paint about what God was showing them. It had nothing to do with the lesson. And that didn't matter, nothing to do with the story. But it was their thoughts about what God was showing them.

So when we allow them the freedom to choose the type of response they want to God's whispers in their heart, it's wonderful to just watch what they do.

And so we model that you learn, you listen. I teach, I talk. And what a difference it makes if we turn that around and allow dialogue to happen at every level. Yeah.

Weird, I know, but I loved it because, unlike some of my earlier classes, this was not an assignment where I just regurgitated information, even though that was necessary at the beginning. This time, I had a question about God that I was genuinely captivated by and confused by. I was excited to read tons of books and articles and ask professors questions because I had a question that wouldn't let go of me. That's, after all, the goal of this show, that hearing the unashamed questions of kids would help us grownups remember what it's like to be curious about God, not defensive or territorial, or anxious about getting everything absolutely right, but open-handed, expectant that if we run down a rabbit trail, we might just find something amazing.

Curiously, Caitlin is a production of Holy Post Media, produced by Mike Strelow, editing by Seth Corvette, theme song by Phil Vischer. Be sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and leave a review so more people can discover thoughtful Christian commentary, plus cute kids and never any butt news.