How to tweak any curriculum to grow God-connection
The five key tools are skills Parenting for Faith teaches parents and carers so they can share what they know of God effectively with their children and teens. They are also really useful for helping those of us who lead sessions in church groups help everyone connect personally to God and understand him better.
As people working with children, young people and families, we often used pre-prepared curriculum sessions. This might be a Sunday group or a youth, or a group with parents and carers and their kids, like an outdoor church or toddler group. With just a little thought we can add in the five key tools.
What we want from a session
It’s worth taking a step back and thinking about what you want to happen in and as a result of a session. There may be a specific aim of learning something about God, but there are also things we probably want to happen every session:
- An opportunity for everyone present to connect with God personally
- Help everyone understand and dig into God’s word in the bible
- Help people make the jump between what they’ve learned about God today and the significance of that for their everyday lives.
What this looks like will vary depending on the group, the ages present, and their knowledge of and connection with God. However, by planning to include these three factors, you can give everyone a chance to connect with God, dig into what the bible is saying and see what all of this has to do with their everyday lives.
Decide what is the aim of this session
When you look at the session, ask yourself: what do I want the children, young people and parents and carers present to understand about God from this session? This might be: that he is always there, that he forgives, that we can talk to him. This will help you focus your session and any adaptations you make to it. This might be different from the original aim of the session and that’s OK. Just keep it in mind as you make your adjustments.
Build in the five key tools
What this might look like in a typical session:
Worship
Worship is often understood as singing and isn’t always wildly popular.
Surfing the waves key tool: Remind people that we are all different and can worship differently – you can sing, use our flags, there are some instruments here at the front, feel free to sit quietly and listen or draw, you can worship with your bodies as you dance and move. Offer as many options as are manageable. You might want to think about ways we can worship without singing – make a list of 10 reasons you think God is good / watch a video someone else has produced / sharing stories of what God has done / create a work of art.
Framing key tool: You can frame worship by giving them the ‘why’ as well as the ‘what’: we’re going to sing or listen to some worship music now – because music is powerful and seems to help people connect more easily with God / because these songs say a lot about who God is and why he’s worth our praise. It can also be helpful to think about what people will be learning about God from the songs we sing so we can help them form good views of God.
Creating windows key tool: you can share stories of what helps you worship: for example – I love moving my body when I worship – it’s like God made me for dancing!
Chat and catch key tool: After or even during worship you might want to allow short periods for people to connect with God – we’ve just heard how powerful God is .. in the quiet, why not tell him where you’d like to see his power in your life?
Bible story
There’s a lot about how to share bible stories well in the framing key tool.
We can sometimes just find a bible story has been suggested without any context: ‘our reading is from 1 Samuel 7’ or ‘this is the story of Daniel’. It’s important that we teach people how the bible fits together and that every story or passage is important because it’s part of the whole story of God and us. There’s more about that here.
Think about your audience and what will help them hear, understand and engage with the story best – sharing pictures, using a video, using a storybook – what will work best for them?
We may also need to think through in advance anything it would be helpful for people to understand: archaic or weird terms like ‘atonement’, practices such as animal sacrifices or what part of the bible this story comes from. For example:
- You’ll hear a strange word as we read the story: the word ‘atonement’. It’s a bible word to describe what happened when Jesus died on the cross – how because of that we can be friends with God again. I find it helpful to think about it like this: at-one-ment.
- Way back in bible times, people killed animals to help them say sorry or thank you to God. We don’t do that today, but when Jesus was born, everyone went to the temple and made a thank you sacrifice to God for their baby.
- This story is from the first part of the bible, the Old Testament – it’s about a man called Daniel who had been kidnapped and made to live in another country where people didn’t worship God.
You can help people see what part God played in the story. God’s role isn’t always clear so there are ways to ask questions as you tell the story that help focus people’s attention on his role – for example, in the story of Gideon, stopping to ask: ‘I wonder how God felt when Sarai threw Hagar out?’ or ‘I wonder what God was thinking when Peter stepped out of the boat?’
Talk or discussion
It’s really powerful to help people relate what they’ve heard to their own lives and realise this isn’t just something that happened thousands of years ago or is just a theory. You can do this in several ways:
The framing key tool: ask good questions that help dig deeper into it and work out what difference it makes to their everyday lives; for example:
- If you’d been in the wilderness what would you have been doing? Why?
Do you think that God could still stop a river today? Why or why not? - Has God ever been like this for you?
There are more examples of these here.
Create windows key tool: You can ask someone to share a story about them and God: for example, Andy is here to tell us a story about a really hard time in his life and what God did.
Framing key tool: You can ask people to chat to others and decide what they would like to take away from the story to help them in their everyday lives.
Unwinding key tool: We always want to help people form an accurate and broad view of God so it’s a good idea to consider whether anyone present might have views of God that might need unwinding – for example, that he is weirdly mysterious or gets very angry about sin – so you can address that if needed. You can also think long term – are the topics we’re studying or stories we’re useful giving a broad and balanced view of God over time?
Prayer
The chat and catch key tool teaches people how to have a two-way connected conversation with God. You’ll often find that prewritten session plans tell people what to say and don’t assume that God will answer or talk back. It’s powerful to adopt a chat and catch approach, leaving space for people to catch from God in whatever way works best for them. There’s more about how to do that with children’s groups (this can also be easily adapted for other sorts of groups) and with under 5s here.
If the prayer suggestion is creative prayer, try to ensure that the creativity doesn’t get in the way of the prayer – there are ideas for how to do that here.
You can use the creating windows key tool to give people a glimpse into how you connect with God and chat to him that may help them find new ways themselves.
You might also be interested in a series of five short team training videos for church children’s and youth teams: