Zoom Out: Giving Children the Big Picture

Imagine telling a child a story but stopping at the moment of peril, before the story ends and everyone lives happily ever after. A story without a resolution is enough to keep a child awake at night.

We would never do that. Yet we often do something very like it with the story of Jesus. We stop at the resurrection, or perhaps at Pentecost, and leave out the part where he comes back. Ask a group of children in many Western churches to tell you the story of the Bible, and the return of Christ rarely makes an appearance. (It’s not just the children – many adults don’t reflect on the return of Chrsit).

That's one example of a bigger problem: we give children pieces of the story without ever helping them zoom out.

Start with the big picture, then go back into the detail

Children (especially the thoughtful ones) will eventually ask about the hard bits of the Old Testament. Why did God order those people to be destroyed? I'm always glad when they do. It means they're thinking, engaging, becoming theologically rigorous, rather than passively soaking things up.

My approach is to zoom out first. The big picture is that we are sinners who deserve destruction. Everything beyond that is grace. God made us in his image, and he owes us nothing more. Romans gives the Bible's own answer to the question of why God does what he does: who are you to question God? He is God.

But that is only about half of the answer. The other half is that he is loving and good, and we can look at how his grace plays out. Egypt was judged, and today we are still talking about what God did there and how he is greater than every god of Egypt. His glory has gone on reverberating for thousands of years. The same is true of the martyrs, and of Paul. There is a higher purpose than a comfortable life on this earth, and we're invited to trust that God is big enough for it.

This takes confidence from the adult in the room. That's why training matters. But I'd argue the confidence is meant to come from somewhere deeper, and I'll come back to that.

Our Bible experience give this big picture story to children - over two days we work through the whole Bible together from Genesis to Revelation.

Why under-fives ministry has to be real ministry

There is a reason I insist that work with the youngest children must be actual ministry, not just childcare with a Bible story attached.

If all we teach a three-year-old is "God loves you, God loves you, God loves you," what happens when they are six and their mum dies? All they know is that God is love, and that doesn't seem like love. They have no framework to zoom out and see it.

But if they also know the picture-book version of the whole gospel (we did things wrong, Jesus came to forgive us, he loves us, he is coming back), then they can hold onto something even in a terrible season: God still loves me, and this is part of living in a fallen world. We can spiral that deeper and deeper as they grow, and give them tools to dig for themselves.

Breadth of theology from early on is a kindness, not a burden.

Finish the story: don't scare them, prepare them

Since the pandemic in particular, I've wrestled with how to teach children about the end times. On the one hand, some of it is frightening and I don't want to scare them. On the other hand, if these things happen and we've never said a word, they will be completely unprepared.

I put exactly that tension to Dale Kauffman, who founded King's Kids, and his answer has stayed with me. He pointed out that nobody looks at the first disciples and says, "poor them." Their lives were hard and nearly all of them died for their faith, yet we celebrate that they got to live in the moment when the prophecies were being fulfilled. They got to live with Jesus! We can hold both truths at once. If we are living in an exciting and accelerating time, our children should be invited into it with their eyes open.

The New Testament repeatedly tells believers to watch, stand firm, be brave and be strong. So we had better teach children what we're watching for. We worked with others to produce a family resource that begins with the simplest questions: Why is Jesus coming back? Who is coming? When? What should we be doing while we wait? (Check out our IN:TRIBE resources produce with the Isacchar Network).

Questions to take away

• Are we giving children the whole story, including the end of it?

• When a child asks a hard question, can we zoom out together before diving into the detail?

God sees the big picture of our lives – we need to help our children see the big story at work in theirs.