Take Two

So after last week, I decided to cover the parables of Jesus from Matthew's gospel in the time with the children. Since they stay with the adults for the beginning part of the service until the message, it's not too long of a time, and going through the parables will cover several weeks.

Additionally, parables are very accessible to even the very youngest children because they are object lessons. The truths behind them may be profound and beyond their years, but since Jesus saw it fit to explain God's kingdom through parables, I think I should, too.

Our time together was prayer, simple review questions and then we opened the Bible and read the parable together. Many children don't really read the Bible, and the Bible says it's good to give attention to reading, so I figured this would be a good idea to engage everyone. There are three readers in the group and they all have the same Bible version, so we split up the reading into three parts.

After the first section where Jesus gives the reason for teaching in parables we discussed this casually so we could lay a foundation for our future lessons.

Next we covered the parable itself. Since last week we just read it from a storybook and didn't delve into the meaning, we spent some time tossing around what might be going on in the parable itself. And like any good pop quiz in school, we got to check our answers with the teacher's guide, which in our case is the third section of the reading.

After the reading time we headed over to the white board and each of the four oldest children had a section to depict the parable visually. The first grader wasn't into drawing at that moment, but he loves video games, so we sat and brainstormed about what kind of game we could design about the parable. It was really cool to see and hear how the ideas flowed out of each child, and it let me know how much they have internalized.

So that's what we did this week. Next week, I think I will cover it one more time, since the parable of the sower is so key to understanding many of the other kingdom parables.