Gospel-Centered Children’s Curriculum: Episode #213 (October 19, 2014)
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| click this caption to hear this full episode |
First, my inferiority complex, my personal infirmity—the Lousy Mom Rash—flares. My skin gets red and itchy, and I wonder how in the world I will ever be able to do the right thing. I suck as a mom. I’m a second-rate Christian. I’m not even good at getting my girls riled up for Christmas and Easter. I mean, I can barely muster up the energy and pizzazz for Santa and the Easter Bunny, let alone Jesus and the resurrection.
Second, the stats aren’t so hot. Kids tend to grow up in the Church and get out. I’ve seen it so many times myself—children of awesome, God-fearing parents who are then burning down the doors to get out and away, ready to take on the seductive world with its glories and heartbreaks. I grew up in the church, too, and there have been both good and bad effects of this—most too personal to address here.
This episode, about The Gospel Project’s children’s
curriculum often used for Sunday schools, featured Trevin Wax, the content
editor of The Gospel Project. I would urge all parents, especially, to listen.
I think a pivotal moment in my own thinking happened to me
this one time when I was in a car, headed to Payson for a women’s church
retreat—of all places—talking to some women. I was closest to the driver, a
real supermom and an undeniably fab example of a Christian woman, but I was
friends with the other women too, though—in all honesty—my own departure from
this church was on the horizon and I probably knew it then (albeit
subconsciously).
Somehow or other, the conversation turned to that Mel Gibson
film, The Passion of the Christ
(2004). Some Christians hate it; some love it. But this one woman in the car
said something that struck me.
We were not really close at all, this woman and I. A
newlywed at the time, she was someone I knew of quite well, but I pretty much didn’t know her at all. A highly
impersonal relationship. I knew about her Christian upbringing, her Christian
homeschooling, her upstanding Christian behavior, the nice Christian boy she
had married. And, on top of it, she was really quite beautiful. She probably still
is, but I wouldn’t know it now.
On this car trip, though, she said that The Passion of the Christ moved her in a way she hadn’t been moved
before—despite growing up in a Christian household, despite being enmeshed in
an intellectual discourse about the existence of God. The film did something unique to her; it touched her. Her experience of Christ on
the cross had been, well, sterile.
The visual, the drama, the physicality of
the suffering—rendered in color film—did something different to her. What?
Reached her heart? Made her tear up?
Look, I don’t want to diss the intellectuals. I am not an
advocate of blind faith or faith without reason or a heart-centric, sentimental
religion that rejects mindfulness. Not at all! Not one little bit! I do think
we are, though, soul and body unities.
And, really, this moment lodged in my adult brain and it’s
still there right now. How had the heart of this über pretty girl—pretty in
that elfin, preternatural Hobbit
way—been missed? How had the film of a possibly not-very-nice man touched her
in a way that the Gospel previously had not?
As a mom, I paused. As an adult, I wondered, Where am I? Where’s my heart?
And, so, this episode. We want for our kids to have ears to
hear, eyes to see, open hearts. I don’t think we’re wise to plow ahead without
addressing what is age-appropriate; I don’t think it’s wise to push our adult
understanding on children, often bulldozing our kids down, not noticing that
their hearts are untouched.
You know which stories of renegade church kids—kids who fled
when they got legal—have haunted me? Stories about angry dads breaking Pearl
Jam cassettes (I know, cassettes! I
know, Pearl Jam!) and throwing them
at bewildered and sad kids, the tape flying everywhere, like party streamers,
ribbons unwinding, and the dads, practically exploding, shouting about the
devil’s music, missing the lyrics: Son,
she said, have I got a little story for you/What you thought was your daddy was
nothin' but a...
Other stories haunt me about girls having sex and suffering
contemporary public stonings. Instances of child molestation and porn. Simpler
cases in which decent kids just went off to college and disappeared into the
secular sunset. Frankly, I’ve heard a lot of stories about kids only too eager
to kiss the God-talk goodbye.
Back to this episode. At one point, Wax says that the
curriculum aims to focus on what Christ
has done for the kids—not just on
what the kids should do for Christ. Yeah, that sounds good, right? But do
you know how critical that is? How crucial it is to step away from legalism,
from a sterile understanding of doctrine that is only salvation-by-works in
disguise? Oh, it’s so very important! Seriously, do you fully understand what
happens to the psyche of a child caught up in a thinly disguised
salvation-by-works theology? Do you understand the long-term effects of shame
apart from grace?
In recent years, especially, I’ve been convicted of the need
for an age-appropriate Gospel message for kids. I’m pro-Sunday School. I’m pro—no joke—arts & crafts and Bible
stories and Christmas plays. It’s
not that I don’t want for my kids to be equipped for hardcore studies in the
Book of Romans or the Westminster Confession of Faith. My hope is that these
things are part and parcel of mending broken hearts, hearts broken and ready to
be put back together again.
REVIEWED BY RCC MEMBER JENNIFER BELL
