Although children often say they see spirituality differently, many adults insist either that we need never bring up spiritual matters at all or that we must instill our own beliefs about God into children.
Assumption #1: Spiritual matters are of little importance to children.
The first option may be found among adults who assume that spiritual matters are of little importance to children. The upshot can be to discourage open-minded exploration and discovery where almost all children are curious. Or simply to eliminate yourself as an interested party when children reach out to talk with someone about life and death and meaning.
Assumption #2: Children are blank slates.
The second option is common among more religious adults. The assumption is that children are blank slates, having no natural engagement with God on their own, and therefore need to be taught.
Sometimes the results can be damaging: children feeling forced into rigid belief systems at a time when they more naturally lean toward possibilities and questions. That can lead children to run from the very mention of God.
There is a third way…. Assumption #3: Spirituality already exists in the heart of every child.
What if we listen to and nurture what God has already placed inside of them? What if we serve more as guides or even fellow journeyers than we do as teachers?
What if we work on the assumption that spirituality already exists inside the heart of every child and that God is already active there? Maybe that’s a cleaner window into their spirit.
And our role is not to tell them what to see out the window or to close the curtains on the window, but to facilitate and encourage them so they can see clearly for themselves.
Tweetable: If you’re a child, you want someone to pay closer attention to your human spirit and you deserve it. Click to Tweet
A milestone occurs when children enter school and their relationship pool increases and deepens. They look for ways to connect with others and with God in new ways.
In grade school, you are still the one they most want to hear from about spirituality and the one they most watch to learn what it looks like to live with spirituality as part of daily life.
But now they act in a way that reveals their need to widen the circle to include their friends’ families and a faith community.
For some parents this seems like the right time to affiliate with a religion or faith community.
Community involvement has to do with how a child practices their spirituality, as expressed through various beliefs, practices and rituals. It is an attractive option for millions of families for addressing the longing in children’s hearts for spiritual understanding.
A faith community links up with a child’s needs for attachment and for trust.
It moves them forward to explore the other relational issue of importance to them: how a connection forms between God and a person. One woman remembers when she began to look for this connection:
Just because I was raised in a home in which God was never talked about, doesn’t mean that I never thought about God.
It is true that this influenced me to think that God was not a relevant part of how I go about living my life. And true that being raised in a home where relationship was deeply stunted influenced me to feel that God is distant, even non-existent.
However, these ideas about God being not relevant, non-existent or distant did not form a foundational belief in my core, even though my upbringing should have prescribed it.
There was nothing in my childhood experience to form in me a belief that God is relevant, real or near, but deep down inside these are precisely the attitudes that were rooted in my core, and even helped me to dig out of the relational laziness or isolation that I could have resigned myself to.
A faith Community is an attractive option for millions of families for addressing the longing in children’s hearts for spiritual understanding.
Tweetable: When is a good time to get my family involved in a faith community? Look here for a few thoughts about it.Click to Tweet
How do we do that in a way that informs, yet leaves the door open to explore and journey and be curious as they grow up? What words can we use to introduce God in such a way as to do the child no harm?
Here is a description of God that may prove useful, written in a child’s vocabulary.
This view is acknowledged in every area of the world from sub-Saharan Africa and tribes in the South Pacific to urban centers in Europe, farms in the Americas, and Middle Eastern deserts.
It is not the view of a particular religion, yet is found in the majority of world religions. It is mainstream.
Who is God?
God is a being. God does not have a body. God is invisible. People are beings too—human beings. God is a being who is greater than human beings. You can’t see God but you know He* is there. God has always been there.
God is love. All love comes from God.
God knows everything. He knows what will happen in the future. God knows what you are thinking. God knows all the facts about any subject you can imagine.
God is everywhere at once. He is not limited by time or space.
God does only what is right, good and just.
God has no beginning and he has no end.
God is pure. There is nothing evil about God.
God has unlimited power and authority.
God never changes. He is the same today as God has always been.
God is one-of-a-kind.
God makes himself known by displaying these qualities so that any child can recognize them. The human mind cannot understand God completely. God exceeds our brain’s capacity. But you can understand a lot about God.
*God is spirit, but I use the male pronoun because it is what I encounter most often when people talk about God.You may substitute the female pronoun if you wish.
Tweetables:
God exceeds our brain’s capacity but a child can understand a lot about God. See the basics here. Click to Tweet
Wondering what to say when a child asks about God? Here’s a description that does no harm. Click to Tweet
Children believe in what they cannot see. They seek God. “It’s like there’s a homing device in each of my children,” a mother told me, “God looking to connect with my child as my child looks for God.” When we talk to a child early about God there is an automatic responsiveness.
By contrast, some adults have had negative experiences with religion being drilled into us and want to avoid doing that to others. Some of us feel that spirituality is deeply personal, so children should find their own way. Some of us have no firsthand experience with God and don’t really know what to say.
Our vantage point is different, like in photography.
A mother describes the morning her daughter held the camera, moving through the house clicking at everything she saw.
“Can you show them back to me now?” She holds the camera out to me. Her arm around my neck, we scroll through her photos on the glowing screen.
Frame of a table. A doorknob. A bookshelf skewed on a tilt. Yet her photos surprise, every single one. Why? It takes me a moment to make sense of it.
It’s the vantage point. At 36 inches, her angle is unfamiliar to me and utterly captivating–the study ceiling arches like a dome, her bed a floating barge. The stairs plunge like a gorge. She’s Alice in Wonderland, all the world grown Everest-like around and above her.” (Ann Voskamp)
It is far better to tell children about God, even if you have doubts of your own.
Something simple, like: You can’t see God but he can see you, and he loves you. He is very good and he wants you to have a good life. He hears you when you talk to him. That is called prayer.
Emphasize what God thinks of the child.
C.S. Lewis argued that the most fundamental thing is not how we think of God but rather what God thinks of us–this relentlessly pursuing love, so bold.
Describe God’s nature. This blog’s Resource page has an video description of what I tell children about God. What can you say about God?
Tweetable: It’s more important to tell children what God thinks of them than how they should think of God. Click to Tweet
All of us reached adolescence with childhood beliefs, values and morals that needed evaluation.
Beliefs enter a child’s mind and get established in the mental operating system* without a healthy evaluation of the basis for the belief. In a child’s brain, the ability to reason is not yet fully developed.
When children reach adolescence with little attention given to their childhood beliefs….
We may hear something like this boy’s explanation: “Faith is believing what you know isn’t so.”
They are less likely to come to parents, now preferring peers and those outside of the family.
Take Easter–the resurrection of Jesus Christ–for instance.
Christianity maintains that Jesus died on a cross and three days later, came back to life and was seen by multiple eyewitnesses.
I suspect that for many of the 2 billion people who identify as Christians, this doctrine remains a hard-to-understand mystery. Some older children may leave Sunday’s Easter Service concluding that the resurrection is incomprehensible and therefore nonsense.
Preteens beginning to evaluate their beliefs usually want our assistance:
Begin by listening intently to the child’s belief. Clarify until you can precisely express the child’s belief back to him (and the child says “yes, that’s it”).
Use the same active listening to unpack the child’s conflict, doubt, question about their belief–so that you can state it precisely and the child says, “yes, that’s it.”
Brainstorm options for checking the accuracy of the belief–resurrection–in our example (weigh evidence from science, history):
Talk to trustworthy people who see the issues from different perspectives.
Although children often say they see spirituality differently, many adults insist either that we need never bring up spiritual matters at all or that we must instill our own beliefs about God into children.
What if we listen to and nurture what God has already placed inside of them? What if we serve more as guides or even fellow journeyers than we do as teachers?
A milestone occurs when children enter school and their relationship pool increases and deepens. They look for ways to connect with others and with God in new ways.
For some parents this seems like the right time to affiliate with a religion or faith community.
Just because I was raised in a home in which God was never talked about, doesn’t mean that I never thought about God.
A mother describes the morning her daughter held the camera, moving through the house clicking at everything she saw.
It’s the vantage point. At 36 inches, her angle is unfamiliar to me and utterly captivating–the study ceiling arches like a dome, her bed a floating barge. The stairs plunge like a gorge. She’s Alice in Wonderland, all the world grown Everest-like around and above her.” (Ann Voskamp)
All of us reached adolescence with childhood beliefs, values and morals that needed evaluation.