My wife and I just returned from “The largest Christian homeschool conference in the Northeast.” We eagerly anticipated this event, and it didn’t disappoint.
So many benefits came from the time. We were able to get our hands and eyes on many curriculum options, finally choosing what we will use for the coming school year. We couldn’t even wait for the Fall to begin; as soon as we got home, we unwrapped a few things and immediately did the first of the new lessons with our children. They just loved it, and our energy was still high from the buzz of the convention.
This blog isn’t about homeschooling, though, but about Bible study. So, to get to the point: what I learned about Bible study is that we need much more of it.
At the convention, we heard a number of talks on various topics: publishing, storytelling, simultaneously instructing children of different grade levels, and including the preschoolers in homeschool time. The last session we attended was especially helpful, in that the speaker (Marilyn Boyer of Character Concepts) listed about 30 character qualities, from the Bible, that we should seek to instill in our children. She gave loads of tips on how to help our children connect with the Scriptures on a heart level, through memorizing them, meditating on them, and applying them to all of life’s adventures.
What I found noteworthy was that, other than this final session, the Bible was almost completely absent from the other workshops we attended. To be fair, we could only attend a small fraction of the workshops, and perhaps we chose the only ones weaker on Scripture.
But I can’t help myself thinking that if “Christian homeschooling” can get dislodged from its moorings in careful biblical study, it’s merely symptomatic of Christian culture at large, which can be saturated with morals and activities but be somewhat barren when it comes to understanding God’s Knowable Word.
I’ll list just one other symptom that struck me. Among the hundreds of vendors, we must have seen dozens of Bible curricula for children and teenagers. This encouraged us. However, almost every sample we perused focused on either the Bible’s stories, its ethics, or its theology.
These three are important topics, but what I’d also like to see is training for children and teens in how to study the Bible. My hope for our children is that by the time they graduate high school, they won’t need a Bible text book anymore. I’m not saying they’ll have perfect knowledge of all things, independent of the Christian community or the preaching of God’s Word. I just mean that I’d like them to be able to pick up their Bibles, read them profitably, understand them rightly, and be equipped to use them to change the world.
Pete! That's brilliant! You're absolutely right – there is a dire need for a straightforward way to teach kids how to study the Bible for themselves. It's certainly something I was never taught until I got to college. Will you write something?? I think you'd do a fantastic job at it.
Thanks for your kind words, Kristin. I agree that there is a great need for something like this. We've done it at churches we've belonged to with children as young as 12 or 13, but we never had a curriculum for it. Does anyone else know of something that already exists for children?
Even without a specific curriculum, though, let's continue training people who can teach others (including children!).
As someone who has grown up going to the Chap Convention, there are many different versions of EVERYTHING there. Something that had been talked quite a bit about in the circles that I was in, was the change in homeschooling from Christians to just about anybody. This is the major decline in good bible study at the CHAP convention. I think the newest changes (online education) to education will make a major change in homeschooling though. I can’t wait until Christians really meet up with those.