Kidmin Apologetics - a Non-Negotiable

Should kids be taught apologetics? Absolutely! But how? Discover practical tips in this episode. 

Transcript

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Gather round, Kidmen leaders, and be encouraged and equipped as you build the kingdom. Now here's your host, Amber Pike. Welcome back to the Kidmen Huddle. One of the things I think is a non-negotiable in Kidmen is teaching apologetics. Do you agree or disagree? Now, what do I mean by that? Maybe we need to take it back a step, talk about what apologetics is, and then we'll talk about is it important in children's ministry. Well, apologetics... is the defense of the Christian faith. So it is being able to know what you believe and why. And it's actually a biblical concept. 1 Peter 3.15, Peter says that we need to be ready to give a defense for the faith, for the hope that we have. We need to know what we believe and why. There's a little more that goes with that. We need to know what others believe so that we can also compare and know why we believe what we believe. But it is an important concept. Is this something for kids, though? Do kids need to know what they believe? Do they need to know what the Bible says, this faith that they are adopting as their own, that they are choosing to follow Christ? Do they need to know what that means to be able to understand it and articulate why they believe that and why it's true? Absolutely. We need to be teaching apologetics in children's ministry. We need to go beyond just reading them a story and having a game and coloring sheet and sending them on their way. We want them to have a deep and vibrant lifelong faith. And apologetics is a way that we see this happening in kids. Think about your kids. Think about the world that they are living in. If you've been in any of my breakouts, when I'm talking about the world that kids live in, it is really easy to get examples of the secularization of culture that our kids are up against. So our kids have questions because they're seeing opposite statements being told to them as truth. Is this true that I heard at church? Or is this true that I saw on a show or heard at school or heard from my teachers or friends or coaches? What is true? we have to teach them the answers to show them how to find the answers for themselves. They have questions. And when they are not given the answers to the questions or told how to find them, if they're told, well, we don't ask questions, you just need to go sit down and believe it, that makes them look somewhere else that is a This is statistically one of the things that they have found caused so many young people to leave the church. If you've heard that statistic where like 75% of young people are leaving the church, not getting answers to their questions is a really big contributing factor. And when you flip the argument and say that, well, the other side of things, the not Bible side of things, sometimes that argument's really compelling, right? So if the world is willing to take the time to answer and explain and quote reason with them, and we're just telling them Bible stories and not to ask questions, that's not good. A deep and vibrant faith is one that you understand and can defend. I'm going to give you just a couple of real life examples of some stuff that in our kids' world. We are library people. We love our library. It's not as cool post-COVID as it used to be. They had a lot more programs, but we love our library. So I went one day looking for things that I don't agree with in the kids' section. So easy to find right there, brand new release, top shelf, highlighted, you know, featured book kind of thing is the daddies with the child at the Pride March event. where any kid can check out. If you're not watching what your kid's checking out or what they're reading at the library, maybe you're checking your books out. That's completely against what God's word says. TV shows, movies that your kids are watching, even wonderful ones. I am a Disney princess girl. I love my princesses. I think Moana is a very, very cute movie. But if you're looking at what Moana is saying, it has an entirely different creation narrative than what is in the Bible. If you get into all of Moana and then Moana 2, there's this whole like spirit thing where you can be, you die and you can become a spirit and you can talk to your descendants. It's confusing, yes, but it's teaching the opposite of what God's word teaches. So if we've not taught our children in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and this movie that they might love and want to dress up like the princess and be like her, or maybe they want to be like Maui and have the cool powers and make things happen. If we are not grounding them in the truth, the world's lies sound believable. It's everywhere. Movies, TVs, books, internet. Don't even get me started on the internet. I made the mistake in prepping for a breakout of using my personal YouTube channel to look up drag queen story hour-esque shows, just as an example. And I found one that was just so appalling. Grown men, hairy men are dressing up as girls and reading kids' storybooks. And the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of subscribers made me so sad. But then I'm like, My daughter uses my YouTube account and I didn't do this as a guest. So I had to have a talk with her because, you know, it's reading your feed and the things you clicked on and then it's suggesting things for you. So we had to have a talk. If you see something like this, this is why mommy clicked on this. You do not. Here's what God's word says. It is everywhere for our kids. They have to know God. what Christianity is about. They need to understand God's word and Jesus and sin and salvation. They need to know what their faith is so they can choose to adopt it as their own and live it out. And then they need to be able to defend it. And I'm talking starting at littles on up. We in children's ministry must teach apologetics. So how do we do that? One, I'm going to encourage you to check with the curriculum that you have. You need a curriculum that is teaching apologetics. Now, some of you have the choice in choosing what curriculum you're using, or you might be locked into it. Maybe you're not the decision maker. If it is within your power, choose a really good apologetics-based curriculum. One that always starts on the Word. That is our starting place. Always, always, always. It saddens me how many curriculums are not starting with the Word or ever using the Word. But an apologetics-based curriculum is going to start with God's Word. Um, it's going to have that worldview apologetics issues in there. This is what the world is saying. Here is what God's truth is saying. Find that curriculum. There are some great ones out there. Send me a message. If you're looking for something specifically, maybe I find out a little more about your church context and I can recommend something to you. Other ways that we can do this outside of curriculum. Well, ask them questions. Like ask your kids questions. Well, how do we know? How do we know this is true? What do you think? We want them to be thinking and figuring things out. On the flip side, be open to their questions because kids have questions. And quite frankly, you're going to be floored at some of the things going on through their brains. I had one of the early in ministry aha moments for me. I had, I think he was in third grade. It's been so long ago. I've forgotten a little of the details, but I think he was in third grade. And he came up to me and he asked, hey, Miss Amber, how long were the length of the days of creation? This is a kid asking this. I'm like, how? You know how many adults aren't thinking on that? But kids are. They have some really great questions. Take the time to answer their questions. Now, you might not know everything. Did the very young Amber have an answer for that? I don't remember. But... I figured it out. I found out. It is absolutely okay to tell a child, hey, I don't know. That is a wonderful question and you stumped me. I'm going to find out. Then you actually need to follow up. You need to find out, do some research, talk to your pastor, go to a reputable source. Honestly, one of my go-to websites is always Answers in Genesis because I know they stand on the authority of the word. I find out and I go back to them. Hey, I have the answer to your question. It is perfectly okay. You are not expected to have to know the answer to every possible question in the world. Also, as you are allowing them to ask questions, be proactive and sometimes give them the answers to the questions that they've not yet asked. There are so many big issues, like big apologetics topics, big things that they're going to question and wonder about. Build that into your lesson. Give them the answers to these questions. Like, okay, take the flood. We believe that there was a worldwide flood because God told us about it in the Bible. Well, one of the big questions is, what about the dinosaurs? How did they get on the ark? They're big. Well, are you giving them the answer to that question before? If you don't know the answer, the... dinosaurs were likely the smaller. You know, you didn't take mature animals because their job when they got off the ark was to go and reproduce. So you didn't take the old ones. You didn't take the new ones. You took teenagers. And most of your dinosaurs were actually a lot smaller than we think of like the giant T-Rex. So yeah, the dinosaurs totally could have fit on the ark. Give them those answers before they have the question. Another way that we can teach apologetics in kid men is to let children discover on their own. Generation Alpha Upper elementary kids, especially, they like to figure things out. It's this logic side of them. They like to discover. And instead of just being spoon-fed everything, to figure things out. Can this happen? Did this happen? How did this happen? Is it true? I'll give you an example of a way that they could do that. When talking about creation, God spoke the universe into creation. Well, what does secular say? How did the world get created? that one of the theories is, you know, all these magic gases floating in space just got together and formed a perfect world for us. And the first being ooze was created. So these mythical things floating around in space, they don't have an answer for who made those gases, but those gases that were just there created the world. So if you get a box of alphabet cereal, sometimes it's hard to find. You could do this with like any kind of letter manipulative, but the cereal they get to eat after. And you give them a cup full, a bowl full, have them spill it out on the table. Without touching it, you want it to spell their name. Even if you have my husband's name, Ron, three letters, you are not going to be able to just shake up your bowl of cereal, toss it on the table, and it spell Ron. It's not going to happen. Especially if you have like a long name, like Elizabeth, quite a few letters. That is not going to happen. The conditions in the universe... Did not just magically get together to form this world that is absolutely perfect for us. If we were one teeny bit closer to the sun, we would burn up and die. If we were one teeny bit further away from the sun, we would freeze to death. If we spun any bit faster, we would spin off into space. If we spun any bit slower, we would also die. If we were tilted any bit one way or the other, we would die. All these things, if they weren't exactly as they are now, we would die. But it just magically happened. But you see, the kids just did something where they experienced and they figured it out. Oh, this can't happen. I can't even do this. How could that happen? Another way that they can discover things is searching through scripture. So give them a passage. This is, again, upper elementary. You need to be a reader. By this point, upper elementary has some more cognitive thinking skills that they need, this figuring out, discovering for themselves. It is key to that age and stage that they're at and also developmental level. But Okay, look through these scriptures. Find the answer for me. Talk about it with your friends. What do you think? Let them figure things out. Let them process. Encourage them to share their answers. But in love, if their way of thinking is wrong, definitely address that and talk about the truth according to God's word. Another way I like to teach apologetics is to bring in confirmations. Now, I try to be very intentional with how I use that word. I don't use the word proof because we do not need to prove that the Bible is real, that the Bible is true. We know it is true because John 17, 17, your word is truth. We know the Bible is true, so we don't need to prove it. But there are confirmations in our world outside of the Bible saying that it's true because sometimes that Bible answer isn't good enough by the world standards. Well, so you're going to believe it because your God says it's true. I don't believe in your God. So when we bring in outside secular confirmations, that's another layer. It's also helping to build on their faith. Hey, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, this is true. So I just keep a repertoire of really cool confirmations and proofs and things that I can pull out and use. My favorite is fossils. I love fossils. I was not a science kid in school. I struggled with it a little bit, but as a grownup, I love science. Man, can you think of any stories in the Bible, true events in the Bible that might've had to do with fossils? Excellent confirmation for the flood because the whole world was all of a rapidly covered in water. And all of those creatures, the animals, the plants that died in the flood were rapidly buried under water and sediment. And that is the bulk of our fossils. You know, there's so many errors in dating methods, like radiometric dating. Take Mount St. Helen, which erupted in the 80s. And they date it as thousands and millions of years old. I don't even know. But we know when it erupted. So the dating methods are not accurate. If you look at the T-Rex fossil where they found red blood cells in that sticky part in the bones, that could not survive millions of years, like they say, but it could survive the thousands of years since they were extinct. But so many of these fossils are great evidence of the worldwide flood. There are, if you can look them up, it's really easy to find pictures of them online. There's one of a fish eating a fish. Now, it doesn't take me that long to devour a hamburger, millions of years, right? But a rapid burial definitely tracks that mid-dinner. There's some of, it's a fish or a whale giving birth, which is cool. But my favorite is a tangible fossil that I get to show the kids. I've got one right here. This, much to my dismay, was not a dinosaur tooth that I thought when my brother found these on our road. In Kentucky. Not a dinosaur. I was really hopeful. But what it is, if you're watching the video, it's kind of hard to see. But this is tubular coral. Now, I don't know how you are with geography. You know where Kentucky is not? Near any place that coral lives. But this tubular coral was found in Kentucky. Evidence of the whole world being underwater. Lots of fossil records that you can look at and show. Lots of archaeological discoveries confirming the people and places that we talk about in the Bible. King Hezekiah mentioned in Kings, his signet ring was found. The walls of Jericho have been excavated and they have found that, you know, those big giant walls that the Israelites marched around and just fell down. That's actually what happened. The fall pattern was not in the city itself. which would have been tracking with an invasion, you know, a battering ram knocking it down, and they would fall inward. No, they fell outward, just like the Bible said. There's also evidence of the fire described in there. Lots of cool things like that. Science. You can bring in the way that animals work and grow. You can talk about animal kind. You can talk about genetics. I teach genetics with my kids, really basic, because believe it or not, I'm not a geneticist. But We are one race, the human race created by God, and we have differences in us because there are differences in our genetics that determine our eye color and the shape of our nose and yada, yada, yada. You can do this with dogs and talk about there is one dog kind, but there are like 300 and something varieties of dog, but they're all still a dog. History as well, there are lots of secular historians that confirm the people and places in the Bible. Josephus, who lived right at the time of Jesus, famous Jewish historian, so not a believer per se, but he has the longest recorded record statement about God in one of his antiquities. He's got this big whole thing about Jesus. He was a man living at the time, and this is what people believed about him. So all of these things confirm the truth of the Bible. And then I like to talk about the Dead Sea Scrolls too, because that's just really cool that the oldest records of the Bible still match what we have today because the Bible is true each and every word. When we're teaching apologetics, we need to show children the world's lie versus God's truth. What is the world saying? What does God's word say? And we need to do this in our lessons. We need to show the kids that God's word is truth. We're building a foundation. Man, you know, if there was like a story, I don't know, like a parable or something that we could tell our kids about a strong foundation and how when like the things get crazy, we could stand. Oh, wait, there is. God even in the Bible gave us a story that works perfectly to describe this, the wise and foolish builder. We want our kids on a foundation. We need that foundation to be the word. If we are grounding them in the word, when we are teaching them doctrine, theology, and apologetics, we're basing it on the word. When the world starts screaming its lies at them, which is happening all the time, they can stand because they have been grounded in the truth. They know God's truth and they can recognize the world's lies, but know what is true. And we have to do this, starting with infancy you got nursery babies teach them that god loves them that the bible is true just start over and over even if that's that one that's your one focus on nursery age is the bible is god's word and it is true man you are giving them a good foundation to start we have to teach apologetics we need to teach them what the world says and lies versus god's truth So another thing that I'm going to really recommend for you, because there's a lot. There is a lot in the world coming at the kids and you. There's a lot of things that we need to prepare our kids for. Key topics and things, questions that are going to come up in their lives. Work on developing a resource list. Maybe even a couple of them. One for you to help strengthen you. One for grownups that you can hand to the parents and say, hey, here's some great resources on XYZ. And then stuff that you can pass out to your kids. If you have listened to my podcast before or heard me speak or follow me on social media, you know that sometimes I'm, not sometimes, all the time, I'm a bit choosy when it comes to resources. And in our spring 2025 issue of the Renew Nation Review, I wrote an apologetics resource list by ages and stages. And so I did a lot of research for this. What are some great apologetics resources for kids from babies all the way up to teenagers? You know, it was kind of hard to fill that list. Isn't that sad? That in the whole world of Christian publishing, I had a hard time finding great things that are going to ground kids in the truth to help them understand God's word is true. Now, there are some great things out there. I think there's definitely the market for some more, especially for kids. I think it's a little easier to find some stuff for teens, but get those resource lists, work on them, review resources as always, do not send anything home until you have looked through it. But what Things are your kids dealing with, your family's dealing with. Where do they need to turn to God's word? What questions might they have? So I have a black book because I'm old school and I like pen and paper. Sparkly pens is my preference. And I have a section in this black notebook and I have it divided topically by resources. So I am, every time I come across a good resource based on a certain topic, it gets added in there. So why is there death and suffering in the world? What resources could I point kids to? How do I know the Bible is true? What resources could I point kids to? What does God say about gender or marriage? What resources could I point kids and families to? I encourage you to do this because when you have a family going through something, you have a kid asking you questions and parents come to you or you want to send something home to help this family, this kid, I don't want you to sit there and go, I don't know. I have wasted some money buying some stuff. There is stuff that I will never send home that I write in it, put sticky notes on it and say, I do not give my seal of approval because when I die and someone cleans out my stuff, I don't want them to be like, oh, here's a great book. No, I didn't think it was a great book. It didn't line up with the Bible. But make those resource lists. And then as you prepare to teach apologetics to your kids, you need to make sure that you're deepening your faith. The Barna Group, who is famous for doing research, they have found that only about like four to maybe eight percent of adult Americans have a biblical worldview, meaning only about four to eight percent of the adults in America believe that the Bible is true and stand on it. That means your teachers, your leaders, your parents might not be standing on the authority of the word. So maybe this is you. Maybe there are areas of the Bible where you don't believe is true. I really encourage you to go through, read the Bible, talk with your pastor, talk to some ministry leaders. The Bible is true. Each and every word we know because God told us that and God does not lie. Work on deepening your faith, deepening your understanding, building your worldview, having that defense of what you believe, knowing what you believe and why. Um, Check out the fall issue. No, I'm sorry, spring 2025 issue of the Renew Nation Review. You can find it all digitally at RenewNation.org. There are some great apologetic resources in there. Also, Dr. Josh Mulvihill's book, Biblical Worldview. It's going to help you a lot develop your worldview. And then I love Everything Answers in Genesis. They have so many great resources that are going to help you understand what you believe and why. They bring in all those proofs and science-y facts, and they have a whole team of amazing scientists that first start with God's Word. So let me give you a couple of additional resources. I told you about Answers in Genesis. I told you about the Renew Nation Review. There's a really cool book called Evidence of the Bible by Clive Anderson and Brian Edwards. And this is really cool science-y finds. It talks about King Hezekiah's signet ring, all of those people, places, and events that happen in the Bible and the secular or some of them Christian, but the historical findings of them, archaeology, scientists, historians, all that. It's a very cool book. And then another thing that you can use with kid is Bible trivia games. Knowing God's word, knowing what is in there, knowing that this is part of it. It's good to test with kids. It's good to repeat, to refresh. I just made one for a lesson recently. It's stand up. If it's true, it's all about the Bible. Reinforce over and over. God's word is true. It's all true. It's all true. Everything happens. And then I have on my website, a lesson. How do we know that the Bible is true? This is something that I add in all the time. So whether you're doing a standalone lesson, whether you are just adding it in part of your lesson, whatever you're using, you can verbally add in pieces. Remind the kids that we know the Bible is true. It tells us in there. God tells us. His word is true. We see through the Bible who He is and what He has done. He alone is God. So I'm absolutely going to believe His word. I really challenge you, look at how you are running your children's ministry. Is apologetics part of it? If not, where can it be added in? What do you need to do to help deepen your children's understanding of their faith, to know what they believe and how to defend it? If you already do have apologetics, where can you add more? I don't think you can ever do it too much where you're teaching God's truth to kids so that they can stand firm in this crazy, crazy world. So where do you need to add more? What do you need to do to make sure your kids can stand firm for Christ, no matter what comes at them? Hey, and remember Kidman Leader, what you do matters.