Faith Times Facebook ad: “If your child knows every Bible story, read this”

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I asked the 23 kids in my 6th grade Sunday school class to draw God. 19 of them drew an old man with a white beard sitting on a cloud, the exact same picture the 1st graders I had 10 years ago drew, and I still have those drawings. I've taught Sunday school at our church for 15 years and in my first years I had the 1st graders. From that year I kept a folder of drawings called "what God looks like". Sweet drawings of a grandpa in the sky, a big hand holding the earth, and Jesus with a little lamb. At 6 that's exactly right. This year I gave my 6th graders the same assignment as a warm up for class, and I expected something different from 11 and 12 year olds, kids who do science projects on the solar system and know what a light year is. I got the grandpa on the cloud 19 times. A few had a lightning bolt and one had a crown. One boy, Noah, drew the cloud really small and wrote in the corner: "honestly i dont know what He looks like but this is what everyone draws". I put the 1st grade folder next to them on my desk. You couldn't tell them apart. They're 12 and their God is still 6. And I know what happens to things you believed at 6 and still picture the same way at 14. You throw them out, not because somebody disproved them but because they feel babyish, like the tooth fairy. Honestly that's what I've seen with my former students. They didn't suddenly become atheists because of some book, they just walked away from a God who never grew up with them. That night my daughter Lily was at the table doing homework, she's 12. "Lily, if you had to draw God what would you draw?" She grabbed a pen and without looking up drew a little stick figure with a beard on a cloud. "Why a beard?" "I don't know, isn't that what He looks like?" "How do you know?" "Mom, nobody knows, that's why it's faith." She didn't say it in a sassy way, she said it like that's just how it is, that you can't know anything about God and believing means you just go along with it. And I realized we taught them that ourselves. We gave them the stories and the songs and the prayers and I'm still grateful for all of it. But we stopped when they were 7, and after that they kept growing in math and reading and science and not in their faith. I told the drawing story at a teachers' conference and another Sunday school teacher started laughing, not at me, but because she knew it. "I did the exact same thing last year and after that I started using this workbook." She meant Systematic Theology for Kids, 52 weeks. I said it sounded like something for pastors. "That's the thing, it's not," she said, "it's the faith they already have, just deeper. Look at week 1." I ordered it from Faith Path that night and read through it myself first. It isn't about a new faith, it's the same faith, just in a way that grows with them. Every week a Bible story they already know, from creation to the resurrection, and then a question a friend might ask and 3 clues for how to answer it. I started in January. Week 1 is about the very beginning, with Your friend says, "The universe just made itself." The first clue is that everything that starts needs a starter. Noah said: "So God can't be sitting on a cloud, because the cloud came later." The whole group turned and looked at him. "Keep going," I said. "Well then He's bigger than the sky and then you can't really draw Him." In week 16 we did Samuel hearing God's voice, and the question of how we can know God is real and personal. Not a grandpa far away in the sky but Someone who speaks and wants a relationship with you. A girl wrote in her workbook: "So He is big AND close." I couldn't have said it better myself. Every week I saw kids who weren't leaning back waiting for the story to be over anymore, they were thinking. Then the parents started talking to me. "My son wanted to explain at dinner why God doesn't have a beginning, and my husband didn't know what to say." "She asks things now I've never even thought about, but in a good way." After Easter I gave the drawing assignment again and didn't say anything about it, just a blank sheet and: "Draw God." I got 4 grandpas on a cloud. The rest were different, a sheet with a dot in the middle and arrows going out and underneath "He was there before the Big Bang". A drawing of an open hand with the whole universe inside it. And Noah's sheet was almost completely white, with one sentence in the middle. "I can't draw God because He made the space I'm drawing in." That sheet hangs above my desk now, next to the 1st grade folder. Lily works through it with me at home on Sunday afternoons. Last week she drew a cloud in the margin of her workbook and put a big line through it. "Too small, mom." If you have a child between 8 and 12 who knows all the stories... If you think your child's faith grows up on its own... Ask them to draw God. If it's a grandpa on a cloud that's not the end of the world, but it does mean your child's faith stopped on the day they learned to read, and a faith that's 6 years old won't hold up until 16. It doesn't need to be a new faith, it just needs to be able to grow. I'll leave the link below, take a look at week 1 and decide for yourself.

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discover.faith-path.co

If your child knows every Bible story, read this ☝️

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