Apologetics for All Abilities

 I am a homeschooler at heart, a teacher. And even though my kids are all adults now, I still love to teach. I love to see the looks on kids' faces when you took something they didn't understand and broke it down for them into smaller bite-sized pieces and they finally "got" it. That "aha" moment, the "now I get it" expression...it's priceless. It's like fuel on a fire for me.

I taught my kids every subject growing up. We all piled around the dining room table with notebooks and pencils and lesson plans I had crafefully crafted for each of them. Back-to-school supplies sales were comparable to a kid in a candy store for me.! Ahhh, there is nothing like a stack of brand new notebooks, freshly sharpened pencils, and the smell of rubber cement to get the blood pumping. LOL!

I belonged to a tight-knit community of friends and other homeschool families and we encouraged and leaned on each other, and brainstormed through each phase, lesson needing to be taught, and grade level. One of my favorite memories was attending annual homeschooling conferences together. We would enjoy listening to and gleaning from motivational and educational speakers who had been there and done that, shopping the football-field-sized vendor hall of potential curriculums for the next school year, and just getting away for some much-needed mom-to-mom time.

It was at one such conference when the way I taught my kids was forever changed. We went to a seminar given by R.C. Sproul Jr. and he spoke about our focus in homeschooling and what truly matters when it comes to what we teach our kids. He said that instead of our focus being on the three R's... reading, writing, and arithmetic...our focus needed to be on the 3 G's...who God is, what God has done, and what God requires. In a nutshell, while it may be temporally important for kids to learn how to write an essay paper or figure out the circumference of any given circle, it is of eternal significance that they know who God is, what He has done for them, and what He requires of them. In fact, I think it's safe to say it is a matter of life and death. Think about it. Our kids are not going to stand before the judgment seat of Christ someday and have to give an account of the questions missed on their history mid-term or be required to pass an SAT-type admissions test for entry into eternity with their Savior. 

Like I said, this seminar completely changed the way I chose to homeschool my kids. While I still wanted them to learn and held them accountable for the lessons I had prepared in advance for them to do, the focus of those lessons shifted significantly. Not only did I switch to an entirely Bible-based curriculum that taught science, history, grammar, reading, and writing using the Bible as its main textbook, but I began to pay more attention to the lessons the Bible taught that the state of Florida did not require be met for promotion to the next grade level.

Fast forward to present day. As I said before, all of my children are now adults. My youngest son, Jeremiah has special needs. He is diagnosed with autism, frontal lobe dysfunction, dyspraxia, and most recently, schizophrenia. He still attends a private school for individuals with special needs where he will remain until he is 22. He was homeschooled until he was 11, at which time it was in everyone's best interest that he be schooled by someone else and outside of our home. 

God fulfilled my desire to continue teaching after my babies were all grown up and graduated by the provision of a position at our church as the Exceptional Needs Children's Ministry Coordinator. Using the Gospel Project curriculum the rest of our children's ministry uses, I adapt the weekly lessons to best reach the exceptional needs students with the truths found in Scripture. I incorporate crafts, science experiments, sensory activities, skits, and whatever else I can come up with so that everyone in my class "gets it", regardless of their ability. And if you thought those "aha" expressions on their little faces were fuel for me when I was teaching multiplication facts and critical thinking skills to my kids at home, well, seeing kids "get" a biblical truth for the first time? Seriously, forget the Zippo-sized canister of propane to fule that fire. Now we are talking atomic bomb excitement.

Then about a month ago, our children's pastor approached me with a book that our church is going to be studying lifegroup-style over a five-week semester during the summer. It's called Mama Bear Apologetics: Empowering Your Kids to Challenge Cultural Lies by Hillary Morgan Ferrer. Apologetics is the ability to defend the Christian faith against those who oppose it or do not believe in its most fundamental truths. I won't go into all of the types opposition. You can read Hillary's book for yourself. It's worth the read to be educated on how all of the "ism's" in our culture today have covertly and not-so covertly infiltrated the media, our education systems, our political arenas, and more to "steal, kill, and destroy" (John 10:10) the hearts of our children from their Savior.

And it's not just our children the enemy is after! Any and every Christian has a target on their back. I have been reminded of this recently with a girlfriend of mine. We have children similar in age, homeschooled together, attended the same church, and have seen each other through many difficult life circumatances over the 20+ years we have known each other. I love her like a sister because she is one...in my heart and in the faith. I know that I know that I know that she belongs to Jesus.

A single mom, a little over a year ago, she started a new job outside her home to help make ends meet. Her new progressive-thinking and politically correct co-workers swarmed like dung beetles at a poop party. Initially, the red flags were so glaring, she clung to the Truth and we spoke frequently about the enemies tactics and the target on her back as a believer. But then, little by little, in ways so subtle even the trained heart might not have even recognized them, she began to make compromises...infinitesimal at first...just a nanosecond of a blip on the spiritual warfare radar.

Fast forward to today and she has relinquished custody of her children to their father, is living with a married man, and is practicing enlightened consciousness, "the process of the removal of the thinking mind". You could knock me over with a feather. In a million years, I would have never thought she could be where she is now. It has been devastating to witness, like observing someone being blindsided by a car as they cross the street in rush hour. Needless to say, she no longer speaks to me, likely because she knows what I will say to her...in love of course. So I fight for her on my knees instead.   

That is the reality for my once Bible-reading, lifegroup-attending, sold-out-for-Jesus, praying accountability partner. How much easier could it be then for the enemy of our souls to pick off children who can be so easily deceived by all the culture bombards them with on a daily basis and everywhere they turn? "Gggrrrrrr," growled the mama bear in defense of her cubs!

I think we can all agree that, regardless of the age of our children, once a mama bear, always a mama bear. My adult kids are subjected just as much now to untruths and cultural cuckoos as they ever were under my protective wing, probably more so now that they have to navigate this world and make decisions for themselves. And we don't have to be biological or adopted mothers of children to be mama bears. I am a mama bear to each and every child I teach in my ESE class at church. I take very seriously their heart conditions and feel the gravity associated with coming alongside their parents to teach them life-saving Scriptural truths. 

I have one little girl in my class who is the queen of "why's". Even when it comes to concrete and basic truths that are easily provable, she wants to know why. And the good-old, "because I said so" or "because that's just the way it is" does not satisfy her curiosity and is an inadequate response as far as she is concerned. "Lily, did you know that the sky is blue today?" "Why?" "Because it is springtime and there are no storm clouds in the sky today." "Why?" "Because there is no rain in the forecast." "Why?" "Because God does not have rain planned for today." "Why?" And it goes on and on and on! But it's not just questions like this. Here is one conversation we had recently after a lesson on the stoning of Stephen. "Why would people throw rocks at someone?" "They did not like what Stephen was saying to them about Jesus." "Why? I thought Jesus was good news." "He is. But some people do not believe He is good news. He makes them feel bad about their choices to sin or do wrong things. They don't like to feel bad about themselves and so they choose to close their ears and not listen when people talk about Jesus. Then they don't have to feel bad." "But why did the people throw rocks at Stephen? They could have just walked away from him. That's what my mom says to do when someone makes me mad." "I don't know why they didn't just walk away. Maybe because everywhere they went, Stephen was there talking about Jesus because that's what God wanted him to do and they could not get away from him." "But killing somene is wrong so why did they do that?" "They were angry and they wanted to shut Stephen up." "Why did God let them throw rocks at Stephen?" "God let them throw rocks at Stephen for many reasons. He wanted the people watching to see how brave Stephen was and how much He trusted God even though he was being hurt. God wants us to be brave for Him too. He wanted people to see that Stephen was obeying God to tell others about Jesus even though he was getting hurt for it. Obedience to God is important. It was time for Stephen to die. God knows how many days we will be alive and when it is time for us to die, we will die. There are probably other reasons why God let the people throw rocks at Stephen too, but God has not told us." "Why doesn't God tell us everything?" Oh you can only imagine the questions spurred on by every answer I gave her! I could literally see the wheels turning and formulating them even as I was still answering her previous questions. I do love her. She challanges me to dig deeper for truths I need just as much convincing of as she apparently does.

Lily's questions and others like it...How do we know God really exists? Why does God allow bad things to happen? Why do people suffer? How do we know Jesus is the only way to God? Did God really create everything? Did Jesus have to die on the cross for us to be forgiven?...they are valid questions that anyone can have, regardless of age, race, financial or political status, or cultural.

We each have an obligation as Christians to research and help answer these questions for ourselves and for others inquiring. Yes, some things just need to be accepted on the basis of faith alone, but squelching embers of doubt before they can ignite and consume hearts is necessary as defenders of our faith in a battle against a very real enemy.

That's where I feel convicted after having read mama Bear Apologetics. Have I just been content to teach my kids the cute  and heart-warming Bible stories that are depicted on nursery walls like Daniel in the lions' den, Noah's ark (which is anything but heart-warming by the way), Jonah and the whale, the birth of baby Jesus, and so on? Sure, each of those stories have biblical truths tied to them and valuable life lessons can be learned from them. But they are not going to be referenced to answer how we can know that the Bible is the inspired Word of God and where it came from or how a loving God can send people to hell.

I do not feel qualified to answer any of these questions either and there are some great  resources by some truly God-inspired and gifted individuals who have done the deep-digging research. In my next post I will give you a list of excellent resources for apologetics for kids. There are many out there and I am setting a goal for myself to make my way through all of them so that I can be better equipped to teach the kids God has entrusted to me. 

In future posts, it is also my goal to take some of these resources and adapt them much the way I do our weekly curriculum so that they can be easily accessible and understood by kids of all abilities. Kids with exceptional needs are very concrete thinkers. They do not think in the abstract. They see things as black and white. They need to be taught differently, utilizing sight, sound, and hands-on application to grasp tuths many other kids can simply read about to accept and understand. Not just special needs kids need to be taught this way to comprehend information either. There are lots of kids, not diagnosed with any developmental or learning challenge who learn best when presented with different teaching styles. That's what I hope to do...break down some apologetics questions into easily teachable and understandable lessons for anyone to learn.

I listened to a podcast with singer/songwriter Tauren Wells recently. In it, he stated that each of us as Christians has an identity, a calling, and an assignment. Our identity does not change. It is concrete. For example, I am a woman created in the likeness of God...a daughter, friend, mother, wife.

Our calling is what God has called us to do. We can have more than one calling. For example, all of us are called to be disciplers who make disciples. But we have individual callings God has on our lives as well, callings that may or may not change over time. I believe one of my callings, and probably the most significant for me, is the calling to teach.

Next we each have assignments. Assignments, unlike callings, can change based on the seasons of life we find ourselves in. For example, before I had any children, my calling was teaching and my assignment was going to college for elementary special needs education to learn how to teach. After college, my assignment was teaching in a classroom. Once my kids were born and my season of motherhood began, my assignment became homeschooling my children. An assignment for me during my kids' teen years was middle school youth leader. It was another opporunity to use my calling to teach. Now, my assignment within my calling is teaching the special needs kids at our church.  

I am very excited about this assigment and, with the introduction to apologetics, feel that a sub-assignment if you will, is teaching kids who learn differently how to defend their faith. I am beyond humbled that God might choose me for this assignment and look forward to all He will do to strengthen His children everywhere in their faith and make them great defenders of His truths. Join me as I attempt to break down the three G's...who God is, what He has done for His children, and what He requires of them.