How We Teach Our Children

The most complex questions of theology or church politics can be influenced by the most simple lessons which people have learned as children. For better or worse, those who teach Sunday School, Vacation Bible School, and other programs for small children may have as much influenced as the most eloquent preacher or the most educated theologian.

I happened to walk down the hallway of a Christian elementary school recently. I won't disclose the denomination, because this situation could easily occur in many different branches of Christendom. Outside the Kindergarten classroom, a series of worksheets were displayed on a bulletin board. The activity is called "scripting," and is a fruitful pre-writing technique: a method used for students at the level before they are expected to be able to write fluently. The student simply speaks, and the adult transcribes exactly what the student says. This is a good way help children understand the power of writing.

In this particular case, the teacher had printed at the top of the worksheet, "Jesus loves me because ..."

The students then completed the sentence. Although successful as a technique for teaching writing, this particular example was a spiritual disaster. The ways in which the students finished the sentence betrayed a shocking world view:

Jesus loves me because ... I pray often ... I'm nice to people ... my family is in church every Sunday ... I don't use bad words ... I stopped hitting my little brother ... I help people.

While an admirable display of virtue, these statements display a complete lack of grace. I do not want to sound too harsh, but the intuitions presented by these Kindergarten students are essentially pagan. If not corrected, what mayhem will these children produce thirty or forty years into the future, when they are adults - and some of them will be presidents of parish counsels, elders, lay ministers, Bible study group leaders, etc.?

Although though certain developmental stages of intellectual development may make the task more difficult, it is nonetheless essential that we teach even small children the principles of unearned grace. Children tend to divide the world into "good people" and "bad people" - and they find it difficult to see that the moral reality is much more complex than that. In any case, however, they can begin getting used to the idea that God loves all people.

We can teach children that all humans are created in God's image - something good - and that all have sinned and fallen short of the God's standards - something bad. Thus all of us are in the same spiritual situation, and Jesus tells us to "call no man good." From this point, we can explain that God's favor toward us is totally unmerited: not "Jesus loves me because I ..." but rather "Jesus loves me because He ..."

How can we expect a fifty-year-old man to display grace, when as a five-year-old boy he was allowed to imagine that God loves him because of what he does?

Balanced Ministry

Peter, James, and John saw amazing and miraculous things at the Transfiguration. But on that mountainside, it was also a frightening experience - a glimpse of the glory of God. Note how Jesus ministers to their fear:

When the disciples heard this, they fell facedown to the ground, terrified. But Jesus came and touched them. “Get up,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.”

First, He notices and cares about them. They have His attention. He approaches them - He comes to them, not they to Him: God is the initiator of ministry. Then offers a twofold blessing: He touches them, and speaks to them. This acknowledges both their physical dimension and their spiritual dimension, and is the pattern for subsequent ministry.

Today, Jesus blesses us with Word and Sacrament - the same duality. The Word, written or preached, touches our spirit, and the sacrament is a physical event to honor God's creation of our physical bodies. We, in turn, minister to our fellow human being on both levels: material acts of charity are an extension of the principle of incarnation, and sharing the Good News about Jesus is a ministry of the Word.