REVIVING FAMILY BIBLE ENGAGEMENT

BY PAUL DADD | Children and Families Consultant, SUNZ REVIVING FAMILY BIBLE ENGAGEMENT

In the future, when your son asks you, “What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the Lord our God has commanded you?” tell him: “We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Before our eyes the Lord sent signs and wonders—great and terrible—on Egypt and Pharaoh and his whole household.’ —Deuteronomy 6:20-22 In this passage from Deuteronomy, God doesn’t instruct parents and adults to give abstract explanations or theological propositions in answer children’s questions about His laws and decrees. Rather, He instructs the parents to tell a story—the compelling story that speaks of God’s faithfulness and love.

But why a story? Well, because God has made us a storied people. God has placed within the human spirit something that can relate to, inhabit and be transformed by stories. Stories allow us to understand realities we would not grasp through any other medium. As Ivy Beckwith puts it: ‘I think God gave us stories because God wants us to know God’s essence and to fall in love with God…. I think God wanted to capture our imaginations, and the way to capture most people’s imagination is through a good story.’ Throughout history, God has given the responsibility to families, supported by their communities of faith, to pass on the story of God’s faithfulness to their children. How can

we do that? I think there are some things for us to give up, and some things for us to take up. RECAPTURE THE BIBLE AS STORY Give up: Reading the Bible solely for information and knowledge. Take up: Reading the Bible as a story. While knowledge and information have their place, the Bible is more than an information source for rules and good moral teaching, like a Christian version of Aesop’s fables. And our Bible reading needs to be more than purely an exercise of the mind. The Bible invites us to come to God with our whole person: body, personality, emotions and imagination. ‘What is learned in story…is far closer to wisdom, understanding, or lived truth… The meaning of the story is to be found in experiencing it.’ As families, let’s practice telling Bible stories well, with all of their sounds, sights and smells. Dress up, use puppets or soft toys as the characters, video the story, draw it in the sand… CULTIVATE CURIOSITY TOGETHER Give up: Having the right answers. Take up: Asking the right questions. While the Bible does provide us with important answers to the big questions about God, faith and life, often the deepest spiritual insights come through us first talking and wondering together. Here are some questions to spark deep conversations: • I wonder what you would have said or done if you had been there? • I wonder who you best relate to in the story? • I wonder whether you have discovered from the story anything new about what God is like or what people can be like?

GOD HAS PLACED WITHIN THE HUMAN SPIRIT SOMETHING THAT CAN RELATE TO, INHABIT AND BE TRANSFORMED BY STORIES. "

NURTURE A LIFESTYLE Give up: Running a Bible reading ‘programme’. Take up: Growing a family Bible reading habit and culture. Let’s worry less about a prescribed list of lessons and outcomes to achieve and, instead, find simple, repeatable and fun ways of reading and reflecting on God’s story together. If you are looking for some practical tools to help, you could start here: www. faith4families.org and www.faith5.org .

Let me leave you with the words of Gretchen Wolff Pritchard: ‘we can rob the [gospel] story of its power by telling badly, by sentimentalizing or sensationalizing or distorting it, or by analysing or reducing it to a theological formula, or a lesson to learn to please the teacher. We cannot rob it of its power merely by telling it too often. It deserves to be told— our children deserve to experience it—over and over again…’