I recently asked #kidmin leaders how they help children love Jesus for themselves.
Ed Stetzer: How do we avoid teaching moralistic principles, making the focus moralism, but instead at all ages and at all stages making sure people understand the gospel itself.
Lou Cha (Kenwood Baptist Church, Cincinnati, OH): I think that one of the important things is you know training our teachers because our teachers are the ones that are teaching the curriculum and they are the ones that are imparting the truth to the children. And I think helping them to see that God’s Word is a revelation of Himself.
That the hero of the Bible is God.
He is telling something about Himself to us and sometimes whether through curriculum or even our own growing up within our church backgrounds, we’ve learned so many of the stories but we always look at the stories through the human points of view and the perspective of you know that person, individual person. Instead of looking at a God-centered view of you know this is God’s revelation to us, something about Himself that He wants us to know and understand.
And so I think that a part of helping our children to see that is also training our teachers that they would have a God-centered view of God’s story. That every story really is a reflection of Him and a revelation of who He is and that He is the hero and how can we continually teach every story of the Scripture to point people and kids to say look at what God is doing and look at who He’s pointing to throughout these Bible stories. And so I think as we continue to train and help our teachers to grasp and have that kind of world view as well, that will have a great impact on the children and their learning.
Ed Stetzer: Sometimes when we talk about this idea of “Gospel centrality” it’s …
