Equipping Your Children to Talk About Their Faith

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Hello, friends. Today's podcast question says, "How do we best equip our children to talk and answer questions about their faith? Would teaching them the four-point gospel be a good start? This is particularly important to me as we live in a very secular part of the world."

I think this is a great question that all of us should be thinking through: How do we equip our children to be able to articulate their faith and answer questions about it? That's the question we're going to be diving down deep into today on the Foundation Worldview Podcast, where we seek to answer your questions so that you can equip the children that God has placed in your care to carefully evaluate every idea they encounter and understand the truth of the Christian worldview. I'm your host, Elizabeth Urbanowicz, and I'm thrilled that you've joined me for another episode today.

Before we dive into this content, I just wanted to ask: if you have been blessed by this podcast, if it has helped you faithfully disciple the children that God has placed in your care, would you please invest the few seconds that it takes to write a review on whatever podcast platform you're listening to? If you could even take a few more seconds and submit more than just a star review but a written review, that always helps more people discover our content. And if you're listening on YouTube, just leave a little comment in the chat — that always helps new people discover our content. Thank you in advance for your help with that.

Three Keys to Equipping Our Kids

As we're thinking through how to equip our children to articulate their faith and answer questions about it, I think there are three things we need to make sure we have in place:

First, we need to ensure that our children are grounded in the truths of the faith. Second, we need to model what talking about our faith and answering questions looks like. And third, we need to coach them through talking with others about the Christian faith.

Let's go into each of those three things.

1. Ensure Our Children Are Grounded in the Truths of the Faith

A lot of times it's easy to just assume that our children know Christianity is true and they know what Christianity is, but we have to be intentional about passing along the basics of our faith. Our calling as Christians is to make disciples. And if God has placed children in your home, your primary discipleship calling is to disciple those children.

So just a few things to think through.

Are you doing daily scripture reading and memorization together? Is Bible reading a daily part of your home? Because if your children are not immersed in scripture, how in the world would you expect them to be able to understand what the Christian faith is and then be able to articulate it to others? Is scripture memory part of your weekly routine? Are you actually making sure that you're saturating yourself and your children with God's word? That's the first thing to think through: Am I making scripture reading and memory part of our daily routine?

Consider going through a catechism together. Now, this is not a necessary thing, but I think it can be a wise thing. Those of you who are faithful Foundation Worldview Podcast listeners know that I've recommended the New City Catechism a number of times on this podcast. There are other catechisms too, like the Heidelberg Catechism and the Westminster Confession.

When I was growing up, I was very leery of anything labeled "catechism." In fact, when I first had a small group leader recommend that we memorize the New City Catechism together, I was like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa — isn't that like a Catholic thing?" I grew up in a very Catholic area of the US, and in my evangelical setting, anything that was a question-and-answer type thing was viewed negatively, like empty rote memorization. Even as an adult, I thought, "Why are we going to memorize catechism questions and answers when we don't have all of scripture memorized yet?"

My small group leader was very kind and explained, "Well, what we're doing as we memorize catechism is we are succinctly learning Christian doctrine. We're learning, when we take the entirety of scripture, put it together, and synthesize it, what doctrines do we find there?" That can be a really great way to equip our kids to succinctly understand the truths found in scripture.

Just several months ago, I was watching one of my nieces and nephews, and we worked on several New City Catechism questions together. We learned "What is our only hope in life and death?" — that we are not our own but belong to God. Then we looked at "What is God?" — God is the creator of everyone and everything. Simple questions and answers that ground children in foundational truths.

Are we equipping them in everyday situations to see all of life through a biblical worldview? If you have yet to take the children in your care through our Biblical Worldview and Comparative Worldview curriculums here at Foundation Worldview, I highly recommend you do that. The Comparative Worldview curriculum actually came out of my own experience working with eight- and nine-year-olds in a Christian school. They came from great Christian homes. I was giving them a biblically based education all day long. They were involved in the local church. Yet when it came to being able to look at all of life through the lens of scripture and to hold every idea they encountered up against the truth of God's word, the students in my care didn't have the skills they needed. That's why I created the Comparative Worldview curriculum — I couldn't find other materials out there like it.

We also need to train our kids with the skills they need to soundly read, interpret, and apply scripture on their own. We need to go through scripture with them but also impart the transferable skills they need to know: How do I approach God's word? How do I approach a historical book differently than a poetic book, differently than an epistle? How do I read verses in context? What different skills do I need to study scripture? You don't need materials to equip your kids to do this — you can just take them right to the Bible. But if you need some guidance, I recommend checking out our Studying the Bible curriculum here at Foundation Worldview. The first unit covers understanding the big story of scripture, the second unit is all about basic sound Bible study techniques, and the third unit focuses on understanding different genres and how to read them correctly.

We can't expect our children to share or defend what they don't even know or believe.

2. Model What Talking About the Faith Looks Like

Our children are not going to do what they don't see us model. As I've recommended in many podcasts before, I highly recommend that you open up your home and begin practicing hospitality, both with believers in your church and unbelievers in your neighborhood.

I know for myself, as a child, my parents were excellent at practicing hospitality — with our church family and with those in our neighborhood. I watched, so often around the dinner table, as my parents asked people intentional questions about their lives and about their beliefs. And I watched my parents share their faith.

As an adult, I've been blessed many times to stay with Rosaria and Kent Butterfield and be part of their dinner table in the evening. They're always setting a different number of plates because they're never exactly sure who's going to show up for dinner. But whenever they do have people over, they're intentional about having conversations about the faith. At the end of dinner, Rosaria passes out the Psalters and everybody sings a Psalm. Then Kent opens up the Bible and does a Bible study, and that starts spiritual conversations with whoever is around the table.

It doesn't have to be in your home, though. We just need to get good at sharing the gospel and having spiritual conversations with others. As I was writing notes for this podcast, I was actually thinking about how great my parents are at this.

One of the main people who has discipled me in my life has been my pastor from growing up, Pastor Dennis Burns. He didn't come to our church until I think I was 12. I remember the first time I met him and his wife — they were seated in my dad's minivan with my dad talking with them. I just naturally assumed they were unbelievers and that my dad was sharing the gospel with them, because that's just what my dad would do.

At the time, I was wearing a Rebecca St. James t-shirt, and Pastor Burns made a comment about it. And I thought, "Oh, this man knows who Rebecca St. James is. He must be a Christian. That's weird. I wonder why my dad's sitting with them in the car." I didn't realize he was candidating as a pastor at our church. But I just had the gift of watching my parents share the gospel with so many different people.

So much of what our children do in life will be based on what they watch us do. Even for myself, even now, so much in my life is still influenced by my parents. Just a few weeks ago, I was talking with my mom, and she said, "Oh, I've got to get going." I asked her where she was going, and she was heading out to see a musical that someone she's discipling was in at a high school. That made me think: How good am I at going to the extracurriculars of different children or teens that I'm discipling? And I realized I'm not that great at it. So the following week, I went to a concert of someone I'm discipling at their high school.

So much of what our kids learn to do is just the habits they learn from us. We need to make sure we are modeling spiritual conversations with people, sharing our faith, asking others about their beliefs, and asking them questions to get them thinking.

3. Coach Our Children Through Talking With Others About Their Faith

The person who wrote in this question asked, "Would teaching our children a four-point gospel be a good place to start?" I don't exactly know what you mean by the "four-point gospel." You might mean creation, fall, redemption, consummation. If that's what you mean, I think that's a great way to start. Whether you call it the four-point gospel or something else, teaching our children the truths of the gospel in a succinct way where they're ready and able to share it with someone else is a great idea.

A simple way to summarize the gospel:

1. God created everything and it was good.
2. Humans rebelled against God and became sinful.
3. God didn't leave us stuck in our sin. He sent His only Son, Jesus, to pay the price for our sin and to reconcile us to God.
4. Jesus will one day return to make all things new.

That's a really accessible way to teach our kids how to share the gospel. Different tools like the wordless book or the wordless bracelet can also be excellent ways to teach your kids to share the gospel.

As our kids get older, we're also going to want them to know what other worldviews believe and how to show the truth of the Christian worldview. If you have a child between the ages of eight and 12 and you haven't taken them through our Comparative Worldview curriculum, I highly recommend you do so. In that curriculum, we cover four different worldviews alongside Christianity, showing how Christianity consistently lines up with the truths revealed in our world where other worldviews fall short. It's a great tool for helping kids recognize the truth of the Christian worldview and preparing them to interact with those from other worldviews.

For any children 11 and up, I highly recommend the YouTube channel RedPen Logic. This channel takes different videos from TikTok, logically evaluates them, and evaluates them against scripture. It's run by Tim Barnett, who goes by Mr. B. It's a great tool for equipping your kids to recognize secular ideas and logically evaluate them.

Most secular ideas that our kids are going to be confronted with — not all, but most of them — are going to be coming from people who are just parroting back what they heard. I've found this in life: a lot of times when I hear someone say something I strongly disagree with, rather than contradicting it, I just ask them a question like, "Oh, tell me more about that. What makes you believe that's true?" or "Where did you hear that from?" Most of the time, I find that people are simply parroting ideas they've heard from others. We want to equip our kids to logically evaluate ideas, and the videos on RedPen Logic are a great tool for that.

If you're looking for a resource to even more deeply help your kids evaluate ideas and learn to ask others good questions, I recommend checking out our Careful Thinking curriculum here at Foundation Worldview. The entire final unit is focused on how we love others well through asking good questions and challenging what they believe.

A Quick Recap

The three points we covered today:

1. Ensure our children are grounded in the truths of the faith.
2. Model what talking about the faith looks like.
3. Coach them through talking about their faith with others.

If you found this episode helpful and you want to make sure you never miss a future episode, take a moment to sign up for the Foundation Worldview email list. You'll get practical resources and encouragement for discipling the children in your care delivered straight to your inbox, so you can keep building on what we talked about today.

If you have a question that you would like for me to answer on a future Foundation Worldview Podcast, you can submit that by going to FoundationWorldview.com/podcast. And thanks to everyone who has submitted questions, because we literally could not do this podcast without you.

As we leave our time together, my prayer for you is the same as always: that no matter the situation in which you and the children God has placed in your care find yourselves, you would trust that God is working all things together for your good by using all things to conform you more into the image of His Son. I'll see you next time.