I will always remember my youngest brother, when he was just three years old, standing half-way up our large staircase and calling to his family, “Come and listen to me everybody.” We all gathered below him and he said, “I know who God is! God is everywhere and germs are everywhere. So, God is a germ!” We didn’t know what to say to him.
On the other hand, my second youngest brother, from the age of two, used to spend a lot of time sitting alongside a little bush near our back door. Sometimes he took a book to look at but often just sat there in silence. I asked him why he did that and he said, “This is Pookie Land and, when I stay here, I can feel love all around me.” I asked him where he thought that love came from and he said, “I don’t really know, but it is all around me like I am being hugged.”
Then there is Jacob, aged 6 years. He said recently after drawing a circle full of hearts: “This is Planet Love. Any planet can go to Planet Love if they are hurt or upset, and Planet Love will heal them with love. Like people can go to our church to find love.” Obviously Jacob had a sense of love linked with the wider creation and with the people in our church.
Oliver, who is now 10, asked “Why are there things in the Bible like stone-throwing for criminal punishment and ‘keep your slaves well’? Why even have slaves? Does God really exist?” Obviously, Oliver can see that to have slaves in the Bible at all challenges the existence of a truly loving and good God. He wonders how the two realities can really be separated and why God doesn’t end slavery rather than simply requiring people to be kind to slaves.
Skye, 7, asks “How was God born? How did God come to our world? Do you think God has a mother? Does he have a relationship with other people? Did God create dinosaurs?” She clearly wonders about the existence of a God and how that came to be.
Then she asks “Why did God make a tree with fruit that people shouldn’t eat and then he said, ‘Don’t eat the fruit’…why couldn’t he have just not made the tree in the first place? Is this some sort of big game he’s playing?”
Luke, 6, says “Why did God create nits [head lice!] and why did God call trees ‘trees’, shirts ‘shirts’, flowers ‘flowers’ and so on?”
What children could teach many adults in the church and community is to dare to ask the hard questions of God and each other, to be authentic rather than simply pious. We could be encouraged to read the Bible more critically – to recognise that it was written by many different people, some of whom were simplistic when they explored life and faith or ignorant about the realties around them. They sometimes failed to see the profound questions which many stories raise about the nature of God and faith. We could see that, over the ages, we have learned much more about the world and creation – things which challenge some old ideas.
We could see more clearly a God who sets us free to choose who we will be and what we will do, so that we can become God’s genuine friends and people of faith as we try to deal with the realities of life, rather than simply being unquestioningly obedient. We can see that we are called to humility, as we face our humanness, rather than being judgmental.
Maybe we can learn to honestly share with children our doubts and vulnerability, while at the same time tell them stories from our lives which have given us the profound experiences of the love and kindness of God and the courage to sometimes be brave in the way in which we live out our faith in God’s name?
