Winds of Change pt. 3

Rebecca Nye's research suggests that children have an even greater capacity to ask questions and let the scriptures affect them than adults. She suggests that children have a greater capacity to question categories and play with language until they become personally meaningful. (CS p 98)

She suggests that it's important to the spiritual development of children that they be allowed opportunities for the "data of powerful story, action and symbol [to] pull them about."

She asks, how do we enable children to engage and interact with the strange contradictions that we find "at the heart of faith"? Can we equip new generations to go after God this way and love it? (CS p. 98)

Is this important? If so, how do we do it? This is not the same as having someone tell you how to think and how to believe. It's not the same as someone giving you the answers. I believe she's talking about encouraging our children to actually interact with God's stories and His words and wrestle them.

There's an implication here that not questioning our religious language and our religious boxes breeds complacency. The implication is that this kind of wrestling, having personal faith experiences, and being able to put them into words or pictures is critical to our making faith our own and maturing in faith.

We want our children to make faith their own but to think about giving them room to wrestle with God and His stories and His words is a scary thing and not without risks. The thought of just listening without always telling them that this is the answer, just accept it so you don't have to wrestle with God is like breaking the shell open for an emerging chick.

She says that our questioning and engaging God's story and letting it interrogate us helps us grow and mature in our faith. (CS p. 98) The same being true of children.

If I understand her right, she says that modern education, science in particular - western culture in general, teaches us to ask questions. Yet when we approach the scriptures asking questions, the faith community immediately goes on the defensive. The guided-discovery approach to education and hands-on learning are ways that the educational community uses to help children make learning personally meaningful. That kind of learning generally involves the whole child. Asking our own questions is a way that learning becomes personal.

She says that when a child comes asking questions and finds "problems" with something like a miracle story in scripture, children come with stronger emotional tools. Adults come with complex counter-arguments pulling rank with intellectual explanations. As we play this game of superiority, an adult's more powerful intellectual tools undermine the emotional and intellectual tools of a child. Nye says that this "interaction with children [is] perversely unrepresentative of Christian spirituality. . ." (CS p. 99) The more powerful overpowering the weak.

She says that we need to recognize that when a child comes asking hard questions it means that God's story is affecting them! Shouldn't we be excited about that? What if, instead of giving them intellectual answers and explanations, we encourage them to ask questions and wrestle, and let the scriptures make them uncomfortable? "It's wonderful that the Word is affecting you like this!" and another day, "Do you have anymore thoughts about that?" She says that perhaps we need to communicate to them that wrestling with their questions is what really matters, not just knowing the right answers. I would go alittle farther to ask if allowing children to seek God, or go after God matters more than giving children (or adults) the "right" answers (CS p. 99) but that's pretty radical.

She says that, "placing the focus on how the data has affected the child in this way, the intimacy of subjective engagement with Christian material is protected and affirmed, and it will be easier ... for the child to discover that what matters in the end is what this miracle [or scripture] asks of people, rather than objectively analyzing it..." (CS p. 99) (My bold print.) She says that focusing on how the word personally affects a child protects and affirms a child's intimate, personal, subjective interaction with God.

When your kids are in that seeking mode part of you is happy that they're going after God to make faith their own, but the other part of you wants desparately to see them get it over with and get on with life ... When they're seeking God we're desparately afraid that they'll get lost. After all, they're only children. They don't know what we know...

Allowing this approach into any ministry seems an incredibly risky thing to do. It would radically change the church to be always seeking God, never assuming we have all the answers. It would require an incredible amount of faith to bring this approach into Children's Ministry. It would make us more dependent on God because it requires that God interact with our children with or without us. Yet what a wonderful thing to be able to say to someone, if you seek God with all our heart, He'll let you find Him and see it happen. Children are especially ripe for this.Children still love both the seeking and the finding. A child's faith still believes that God keeps promises. We're the ones who are afraid.