…Impress (these commandments) on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Deuteronomy 6: 6-7
Do you know what this is? Each dot represents an hour. This is how many hours the average child spends with their parents each year. About 3,466 hour a year. This excludes time spent in school
The red dots represent how many hours the average child of church going families spend in actual Bible Study time. Just 40 hours a year and that is if they attend Sunday and Wednesday.
There is no way for the church to teach and train our children to love God with all their heart, soul, mind and strength. We cannot put all the responsibility on the church to train our children to be committed Christians.
As parents, we need to be working with our children to help them become all that God wants them to be. We need to be encouraging them to read their Bibles. We need to encourage them to attend Sunday School and other church functions.
Our children’s literature has undergone some wonderful changes. One being that our Preschoolers, Children and Youth and most of our Adults are all learning the same thing. Obviously it is on different age levels and sometimes the application of the story may be different. But here are two of the biggest changes:
- On the back of all the student take home pages is a summary of what they learned in Sunday School that day and how to apply it to their lives. They give a suggestion or two as to how to help them apply the lesson to their lives that week
- Each month the children bring home a piece called More for grades 1-2, Adventure for grades 3-4, and Bible Express for grades 5-6. These bring home pieces have daily Bible readings which will help your child learn and apply the Bible Story and Application.
The bottom line is that it is our responsibility as parents to train our children about the things of God. The church should be supporting what you do at home. What do we need to do differently at home to help our children grow? Are we the kind of Christians that we hope our children grow up to be?