Proclaimer Blog
Teaching the prophets to children. Seven reasons why we don’t.
How would your children’s teachers in church react if you told them they needed to do a series on Ezekiel in Sunday School? I bet it wouldn’t be met with universal enthusiasm. Why not? After all. All of scripture is God breathed. Teaching prophecy is not on too many curricula though, I would guess. Here are seven reasons why we don’t do it. And one good one why we should.
1. Kids’ leaders don’t hear prophecy taught well in church and so don’t have confidence to do the same. Their chief learning experience for teaching others is almost certainly your own preaching; if they are too scared to teach prophecy to kids, you need to ask yourself some pretty searching questions first.
2. We don’t have a huge quantity of good material to draw down on. Truth be told, some of our kids material is a bit Ho-hum anyway. And that’s for the easier parts of the OT. A friend ministering in Surrey told me this week that he was using The Gospel Project in their Sunday School. They’ve done a minor prophet a week, he told me, with this material, and both kids and adults love it. Look it up.
3. We don’t have confidence in poetry for kids. I’ve been away at our Women in Ministry conference this week. Almost 100 women, many of whom teach kids: and we’ve been focusing on prophecy. What has been astonishing is how those who are experienced in teaching kids have seen very quickly how the images of poetry actually resonate with youngsters better than they do with adults. We probably imagine the opposite.
4. We don’t know the prophets well enough ourselves. We are purple passage prophet lovers (try saying that with a mint in your mouth!). We know and love Isaiah 53, but not 54. Say no more.
5. We don’t know how to properly teach Christ from the OT, so prophecy is especially difficult. We either ignore Christ and make kids into Old Covenant children or we flatten everything and impose a kind of shapeless Christology which has no bearing on the text.
6. Many of our occasional teachers have got used to preparing lessons on the fly or without adequate thinking and prayer. Most of us have churches where this kind of teaching is voluntary, undertaken by full time workers, mums and dads. Teaching prophecy is just, well, harder, and so we imagine we don’t have time.
7. All of these are perhaps symptomatic of a deeper malaise. We simply pay lip service to 2 Tim 3.16. The ‘all’ is particularly problematic. We are pretty content actually with being selective.
There is of course only one answer to each of these points: it is a resurgence of the full acceptance of the authority, sufficiency, clarity of Scripture. A robust doctrine of the word of God will make us as confident in Malachi as it will in the story of the golden calf. And if these 7 reasons ring true, at least in part, perhaps the first thing we need to do is to teach our Sunday School leaders a better doctrine of the holy Book.