Trevin Wax posted an interview with J.D. Greear (video and transcript) about teaching kids the gospel. This is an excellent video talking about the failure of most kid’s curriculum and how to develop a gospel-centered curriculum. This is very applicable, not only to children’s ministry, but to sports ministry. I would highly recommend you watch.
Here are some excerpts I would love to highlight:
A lot of the children’s curriculum that I was looking at, some of what our church was investigating, seemed to be really heavy on… lessons on sharing, lessons about kindness, and lessons about integrity. All those things are very important. But I felt like what most of the lessons left with and what I’d hear my kids come back and talk about was a to-do list. How we need to do this better. We need to do that better.
But really, what you want them to see in the Scriptures is that there’s one story going from start to finish, that it’s filled with characters they need to know about, but that shows them that they should hope, not in their ability to emulate the example, but should hope in the Savior who came for them.
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I want them to know the Bible stories and I want them to know the details, but first and foremost, when we come to a Bible passage, one of the things we’re trying to do with The Gospel Project is we want our writers to first of all ask what does the story tell us about God—who God is, what He is like—and then how does the story point us forward to Jesus Christ.
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You know, I think the hero of every one of our sermons, every one of our lessons ought to be the Hero of the Bible, which is not you for what you do. It is God for what He’s done.
