Heartfelt - The LOGOS Ministry

13 Natural Ways to Help Children Grow Spiritually

by Keith Johnson, children's pastor in Eden Prairie, Minnesota

Here are specific activities to help parents build their children's faith at home.

1. Worship Preparation
Prepare for formal "at church" worship before you leave home. Wake up earlier than your kids so you're not rushed. My mom diffused the Sunday-morning-rush stress by waking us up to the soft sounds of Christian music. Music sets an emotional tone wherever it's heard. It worked for King Saul, and it worked in our madhouse also.

2. Prayer
Have you ever passed by someone broken down on the side of the road but you just couldn't stop? Why not pray aloud for that person? Or when you spot an ambulance or squad car speeding to the scene of a problem, pray for the people involved, their safety, and their relationship with God. You'll find that children fight over who gets to pray. Another time for prayer is just before kids run off to school. My wife commits our children to the Lord and challenges them to stand up for the things that are right and against the things that are wrong.

3. Bible Reading / Study
Read a key verse at breakfast. Read or tell a Bible story in your words before bedtime. Bible reading should be a social, bonding opportunity, not a dry discipline devoid of purpose. Remember: Short passages for "short people," long passages for "long people."

4. Meals Together
Mealtime is family together-time. Even if you regularly don't eat meals together, you can still create activities that nurture faith during mealtime. Assign table-setting chores and the before-dinner prayer to different family members. My daughter loves to have everyone pray with her when she prays. Encourage conversation. I like to ask open-ended questions at the table. Ask each person, "What's the best thing that happened to you today? the worst?" Instead of asking, "What did you do at school today?" get specific: "Who did you play with at recess? Who did you sit with at lunch and what did you talk about? Who was your friend today at school?"

5. Family Fun
Television, the newspaper, Nintendo, shopping, and the telephone can interrupt or effectively eliminate opportunities to build faith. Pull the plug on these things. I like to join my daughter in cleaning up her room. She and I have a great time singing the cleanup song and sharing. Or set up craft or coloring books on the kitchen table as kids get home from school. This will give them an opportunity to be creative and will give you an opportunity to talk with them. Board games have become one of our family's favorite activities. Around the Monopoly board, we dream about what our homes will look like someday on the inside and outside.

Read more at: www.olathebible.org

Helping Your Child Develop a Growing Relationship With Christ

by Dennis and Barbara Rainey Adapted from Parenting Today’s Adolescent: Helping Your Child Avoid the Traps of the Preteen and Teen Years. Copyright 1998 by Dennis and Barbara Rainey. Used by permission of Thomas Nelson, Inc., Publishers. © Copyright 2011 FamilyLife. All Rights Reserved.

These six spiritual disciplines helped our children on their spiritual journeys.

In the sixth-grade Sunday school class that we taught, we would choose a class verse and ask everyone to memorize it. I would pay one dollar to anyone called on during the class who could recite it perfectly, word for word. This is the best verse we found to drive home to sixth graders the importance of making Jesus supreme in life: “He is also head of the body, the church; and he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead; so that He Himself might come to have first place in everything” (Colossians 1:18).

Does your child have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ? If not, pray that God will grant you or others the opportunity to share the gospel. Without Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives, no one will turn away from worshipping false gods. But even with Christ in our lives, we all are tempted in the flesh to serve these bogus gods. That’s why your child at some point in his teen years needs to develop the following convictions:

• Jesus Christ must be my Savior and Lord.
• Regular prayer must be a crucial part of my daily life.
• I must be the same person in private that I am in public.
• The Scriptures are God’s Word and serve as my daily guide.
• Nothing is more thrilling than fulfilling God’s mission for my life.
• I will pass on a godly legacy to the next generation.

To build these convictions into the lives of our children, we have emphasized a number of key spiritual disciplines. Here’s what we’ve done with our family:

Prayer
Our approach to prayer at home has been to make it a part of daily life and events. Of course we’ve prayed at meals and bedtimes and with individual children when needs arise. We’ve prayed before tests and tryouts and trips. We pray for overseas missions we’ve been a part of, for requests that come through our prayer chain, and for everyone in the public schools our children attend. We’ve prayed as we’ve driven the children to school, and now that Rebecca is driving to school, we remind her and her sisters every day, “Don’t forget to pray.” We’ve also prayed during our family devotions in the morning before school.

Read more: www.familylife.com

Children’s Spiritual Development

By Ross A. Thompson and Brandy Randall Source: “Implementing the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. A Standard of Living for Development,” edited by Arlene Andrews and Natalie Kaufman.

1. Definition of Spiritual Development
The terms “spiritual development”, “faith development” and “development of religious understanding” have different meanings, but are often used interchangeably.

Thompson and Randall say that spiritual development “concerns the broad search for transcendental meaning that may be as simple as a young child’s inquiries into how the world came into being or as complex as a theologian’s metaphysical analysis.”i

“Faith development” is the development of a belief in a divinity. The development of religious understanding “involves an individual’s progressive adherence to a propositional network of values, creeds, and practices of organized religion.” ii

Spiritual development may be associated with or incorporated with faith development and religious understanding. “Spiritual development invites reflections on the transcendental and the metaphysical, on values that arise from fundamental propositions concerning human character and existence, as well as on specific religious practices and symbols.” iii

There is no necessary or inevitable process of spiritual growth as is found in the maturational phases of physical, emotional, or cognitive development. iv

Spiritual growth is tied to reflective thought and concerns about questions such as:

• What is the meaning of and purpose of my life?
• Who am I? Why am I here?
• What is my future?
• What defines the differences between right and wrong? Why should I act rightly? Why is there so much wrong in the world? v

“Spiritual development is connected to children’s efforts to understand the meaning and causes of life experience.” vi

Family Book Club: Read Together and Talk

Children’s books are primarily for entertainment and enjoyment. They can also be an important teaching tool for a parent and can lend themselves to good family discussions and the support of critical thinking. Occasionally, while reading to your child, look beyond just the pure enjoyment of the story to the possible lesson that could be learned. Questions that can be used for any story include:

• If you were in this story, who would you be?
• What is your favorite part of this story?
• If you could change the story, what would you change?
• What might a different ending be?
• What do you think we should remember from this story?

One caution: do not over-engage the child into always having to think of the meaning. Some stories are to be read just for the joy of reading. If you are using it for discussion, only ask a few questions---about as many as the child is old.

Our focus for the month of August is on what it mean to be spiritual and how we can foster spirituality in our children. As a Christian parent, we hope that our children will develop a strong relationship with our Creator God and with Jesus Christ. But to be spiritual, one must go even deeper and allow God’s Spirit to be a part of our lives on the journey to grow and walk with God both in our inward personal and outward social dimensions. We are their mentors and can help our children by providing experiences that help them to know God rather than to just know of God. Books can help us with this awesome responsibility.

For our Book Club this month we are focusing on books that help our children develop the fruits of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, as found in Galatians 5:22. We have included devotional books as well as books that demonstrate the good qualities that we need to love God and love others unselfishly.

A simple question is wonderfully answered in Where is God? by Lawrence and Karen Kushner. This delightful board book will help very young children find God in our everyday actions and at the center of all things, such as “in the hands of a baby” or “the first tomato of summer”. After reading this charming book, explore with your child some of these questions: 1. Can you name some places you could find God?
2. Where is your favorite place to find God?
3. How big do you think God is?

Open your child’s imagination to what God might be like by reading God’s Paintbrush by Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, a book for all ages that is well written with beautiful imagery. It does not tell a story, but rather gives short narratives about everyday situations that children may experience. This book has questions following the narratives to help children see how God fits into all aspects of our lives. Read and review these questions with your child.

Read The Golden Rule by Ilene Cooper with children ages 5-8. It is simply and beautifully told and illustrated. This rule is common to most major religions in our world and the book helps us imagine what it would mean if we all treated others the way we wanted to be treated. It even addresses the topic of bullying. Questions for discussion might include:
1. If you could rewrite the Golden Rule, what words would you use?
2. How do you think you could practice the Golden Rule at school? At home?
3. Imagine what our world would be like if we all lived by the Golden Rule. Can you make a picture showing what it would be like?

Some children learn life’s lessons better by doing something hands-on. Crafts for Christian Values by Kathy Ross helps translate values concepts into activities. Your early elementary child can make a gratitude jar to help keep track of the kindness of others or a mustard seed necklace to help remember the power of faith, plus a variety of other projects.

Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt will appeal to your child in middle school or even teens. It is an excellent read and very thought provoking as it touches on tough questions about death and immortality. Questions to ponder:
1. What do you think it would it be like to live forever?
2. How would you compare the immortality described in this book to our eternal life with God?
3. What do you think Winnie learned from her experience?
4. What life lessons did you learn from this book?