Potluck at the Park

It can feel intimidating to bring the whole family together for Bible study. Even in our churches we usually split up into groups by age and life stage, so it’s more than a little daunting to study all together with grownups and kids of every age.

Years of teaching in elementary K-5 large group Sunday school has taught me to aim for the middle. Older kids and adults can follow more complicated ideas, while younger kids will need a simplified version with a more narrative storyline. They’ll all ask giant questions, and you probably won’t know the answers to most of them in the moment (and that’s okay – questions are GOOD). Answer any questions you can as simply and clearly (and honestly) as you can. If they ask one you can’t answer, and they will (my daughter and the kids I teach at church love to play “stump the chump”), admit you don’t know and promise to come back to it. Then research it and share what you learned with them. Some questions will remain open ended discussions without solid answers, and that’s okay. There are a lot of mysteries in faith we can’t give concrete answers to because we serve an infinite God who reveals himself over time to our finite brains.

Some things that can help family study time with kids feel less like a big job:

Read the material first before reading it with your children. Decide what they’re ready for and what’s age appropriate. It’s okay to “edit” to simplify the story and to keep the details at the level of your child’s understanding. The Veggie Tales version of Esther is one of my favorite examples of this; see also, the Storytime Bible.

Decide what “The Big Idea” is. How would you retell the Bible passage in a single simple paragraph? What’s the main point, and what are the most important details that support the main point?

Get the kids involved. We all learn differently, so experiment with different ways to teach the stories to your kids that involve their recall and creativity and movement. Some ways I’ve done this with groups of all ages at church are:

Reader’s theatre – assign parts to each person and have them act it out as you narrate and read the story, or assign motions and sound effects to certain words and have everyone do those whenever you say them in the story, or make the assigned actor parts stand still and have one person move them around like mannequins to act out the story

Doodle or draw – doodle while you listen; draw mind maps to connect and think about the main ideas; make a comic strip of the story

Object lessons – use science experiments that demonstrate an aspect of the main point; show an animal or plant or other physical object that shares characteristics of people in the story or the plot of the story; play a game that encourages the behavior the Bible story is teaching about or with obstacles that can demonstrate difficulties people in the story face

Get the kids to retell the story – there are a lot of ways to do that like letting them just blurt it out together, having them take turns telling what happened next, give them a style to imitate like Western or comedy (or their favorite shows like Bluey or Ladybug and Cat Noir)

Storyline scramble – write story points on notecards or print pictures that represent parts of the story, then mix them up and have the kids put them in order

Write a song together to retell the story or to share the main point it teaches us about God – a fan favorite version of this has been to improvise an opera similar to the reader’s theatre idea where each character had to operatically sing their dialogue (it will be chaos, but it will be worth it because you’ll probably never laugh harder in your life)

Don’t be afraid to let it be a little silly, and also don’t be afraid to sit in the hard and sad moments. Teaching the Bible doesn’t have to include any of those extra activities, and certainly not every time; it can even just be a conversation over dinner or in the car on the way to school.