From Tiny Theologians to Lifelong Disciples: Growing Faith at Every Stage

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Anna Meade Harris
We are here today to talk about what it looks like to nurture a love of scripture at every phase of life. Romans 1017 tells us that faith comes by hearing and hearing comes by the word of God. In other words, growing a mature faith is a direct result of nurturing a love of scripture. So, what we’re going to talk about today is, how do we nurture that love and grow that love for scripture, so that we develop a mature faith in Jesus Christ over the course of a lifetime. We’re going to begin by talking about laying a foundation with our children, we’re going to transition then into how to encourage teenagers in faith formation, and finally we will talk about pursuing mature adult spirituality, which is most of us in this room, and the good news is our speakers today are all passionate about this, and so we look forward to hearing from them. You will notice that there is a postcard slash potential bookmark in your seats there, and it has three different books on there that each one of these folks will be referencing that are resources in helping you develop this faith in yourself and your children. It has a QR code on the back for easy ordering, so you can do it that way, or if you’re just super eager after what you hear, and you want to go buy it in the bookstore. These books are 40 to 50% off over there, so you can scoop it up and take it home and read it with you on the plane or in the car on the way home. You’ll have it with you. I want to introduce our speakers. We’re going to start with Amy Gannett. She is a writer and a Bible teacher, and she is passionate about equipping Christians to study the Bible through the Bible Study School House, and she is also the founder of Tiny Theologians, which is a line of discipleship tools for children and a wonderful podcast, and she and her husband Austin live in Eastern North Carolina, where they have planted a church. And then we have Chelsea Kingston Erickson, she is editor in chief of Rooted Ministry. Chelsea and I work together. She’s a former youth minister, and she is also the author of the Bible’s Big Story in the Old Testament Casket Empty Student Edition, and she’s a general editor of God with You. She has an MDiv and a THM from Gordon Conwell, and she and her husband Steve have two little boys, and they live on the North Shore of Boston. We also have Joe Carter with us, and he is a senior writer for the Gospel Coalition. He is author of The Life and Faith Field Guide for Parents, the editor of the NIV Spiritual Habits Bible, and also co-author of How to Argue Like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History’s Greatest Communicator, which sounds pretty interesting to me. I might have to check that out. He also serves as an associate pastor at McLean Bible Church in Arlington, Virginia. And I am Anna Mead Harris, I’m contributing editor at Rooted Ministry, and I’m co-host of the Rooted Parent podcast, and I’m author of God’s Grace for Every Family, which is a book for single parents, but also for those who want to serve single-parent families in their churches. I’m also general editor of God with You. I live in Alabama, and three grown sons call me Mom. So that’s your panel here today. Let’s talk about what it looks like to cultivate love and passion for God’s word. We’re going to start with Amy. Your work focuses on helping parents lay a theologically rich foundation in God’s word from their child’s earliest years, so what? Why is it so important to raise biblically literate kids?

Amy Gannett
Well, I think that a lot of us, that’s our heart’s desire. If you’ve got little ones in your home, you’re looking at all these little ordinary moments in your everyday life and asking the Lord to make them fruitful for His glory, but kids are not spiritually neutral. I think that a lot of us assume that they have sort of no theology, and they’ll only gain theology as we train them in it, but it’s not true. They are learning about God through the world, through those around them, through their own curiosities, and through what we’re teaching them, and so we want to set them on a path that teaches them about who God is, especially as we talk about as they grow older, and we want Jesus to really be the thing that holds them to really anchor their faith in. Not just our tradition, not just our local church, but Jesus is the one who holds them, who will outlast any teaching that we give them. Well, that means we need to introduce them to the God who is the God who really exists in Scripture, not just our understanding of Him, not just our traditions’ emphasis on Him, but also that just the God who is, and the best way to do that, the best way we can get out of the way, in a sense, is to introduce them to the word, because in the word God speaks for himself and tells us in his own words who he is, and so we want to raise kids who know and love the God of the Bible by opening scripture with them and by training them in biblical literacy is how we grow in doing that.

Anna Meade Harris
That’s beautiful, Amy. So, so what? How would you define biblical literacy, especially? How would you define that for children?

Amy Gannett
Yeah, biblical literacy is understanding, just like we teach children to read, that’s literacy, and we don’t want to just teach them to read letters, sounds, CBC words. If you’re in the elementary school era, we don’t want to just teach them to read words. We know that kids start by reading and a little memorization, but they grow into comprehension of what they’re reading, putting all those sounds together to make words, putting all those words together to create ideas and sentences, and then eventually they move on to paragraphs and chapters and entire stories, and their world actually, as they grow in these foundational tools of literacy, their world grows bigger, doesn’t it? Because they all of a sudden get to enjoy these first chapter books and their favorite characters in books, that’s literacy, and we want to do that with scripture, give them these foundational tools, so that they understand the world of the Bible. So we want to tell them the big story of the Bible. A lot of kids have been introduced to stories and characters, which is wonderful. We never want to diminish that, but we also want to say there’s so much more. All of those characters fall into a grand story of scripture that goes from Genesis to Revelation, and all of those characters in some way are pointing us towards the crux of the metanarrative of scripture, which is Jesus. So that biblical literacy is training them to understand the world of the Bible, and to read it as a cohesive message that all points to Jesus, and so as we give them foundational tools, because biblical literacy is more than memorization, it’s more than Bible trivia, it’s more than scripture memory, all of those things can be a tool in the toolbox of biblical literacy, but biblical literacy teaches them to read the Bible and to read it with comprehension.

Anna Meade Harris
So, I think this is the million dollar question that probably has a lot of people in their seats right now. How can parents teach biblical literacy? You’ve mentioned some tools, but what are the overall. how do we do this? Yeah,

Amy Gannett
it’s the question that we’re all asking. It’s the question that I am asking as I raise little ones. My oldest is six, my middle is four, my youngest is 18 months. So, if you’re in those little years, I’m like right there in the thick of it with you. And I think the first thing that we can do is to love reading scripture ourselves. If you are a mom of little ones, and you’re thinking, when my kids are older or sleeping through the night, they’ll never do, they’ll never sleep through the night. Okay, that is an unfortunate tip that I have to let you in, but if you’re waiting for the next season to have an established time in God’s word. Don’t wait. Love scripture now. Read scripture now. One of the most formative things for me in my years coming up was waking early, going down into the kitchen, where my dad was always bent over his Bible, and then going downstairs, where my mom was always reading it, seeing my parents love scripture changed my life. We want our kids to see us growing and reading scripture. So, the simplest thing and first step that you can take is to be in God’s word and to delight in our kids know the difference between a should do and a get to, and if you believe that reading God’s word is something you get to do, it’s going to be the first step, the first, maybe unexpected step towards biblical literacy for your little ones. So view scripture as something that you get to do. The second is to read the Bible regularly with your children, even if you’re reading it really briefly, I think that we often reach for all these tools that are scripture adjacent, and they’re wonderful. We have a home full of them. I love these tools, but we don’t want to have so many other things that we neglect to read actual scripture with our kids. I love a story. Book Bible, I love it, but I also want to open scripture often enough with my children, so that I don’t want them to get to being 10 years old, and we read them scripture, and they’re going, ‘Hey, I’m not familiar with any of this. We want it to sound familiar to their ears and build into the rhythm of our family that we open God’s word and we read it together. So read God’s word really regularly in your home, even if you’re reading just a couple of verses, and then open up the posture in your family of, we just, when we read God’s word, we talk about it. This is a part of the life of our family. This is not “sit down, be quiet, mama’s gonna read to you. This is this is a part of our family’s life and our joy. They can tell that the posture of invitation versus this is just something I want you to grow disciplined in doing, right. We want to invite them into the conversation, so start by asking them simple questions. After you read something like, what does this teach us about God? What do you notice? And here’s the thing, a lot of us think, oh man, I couldn’t even ask an adult in my Bible study, that they might be overwhelmed by that. You know what, that might be true, but ask your six year old, and they’ll probably have an answer. A lot of times, like I said, we think that our kids are theologically neutral. Just ask your four year old, who is God, and what is He like? They have an answer for that, whether it’s correct or incorrect. They have an answer, and that is their theology. So, ask them, I just read this verse. What do you think? What does it teach us about God? And then let that conversation continue. So then I would say, teach the big story of the Bible, teach creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. There’s four chapters of the big story of the Bible, and help your child understand these four chapters, and I’ll say them again in case you’ve not heard them before. Creation, fall, redemption, and restoration – they’re sort of like the four pillars of the big story of the Bible.

Amy Gannett
And so, by even telling your child, you know, we’re reading in Genesis chapter two, we’re in creation, we’re reading in Genesis three, we’re in the era of the fall, and then moving on to we’re reading about Jesus, we’re at redemption, and we’re at what Revelation promises will be restoration. Telling them where you are in the big story of the Bible is so wonderful. And then eventually you can ask them, where do you think we are in the big story of the Bible? So teach that, and then as you read scripture, help them understand where you are. And then lastly, I would say, teach theology clearly, which means grow in your own theology, grow in your understanding of who God is by reading scripture. God tells us in His word who He is in His own words, and we get to be students who press our ear to the heartbeat of God as we listen to who He reveals Himself to be every time we open the pages of his word, so read scripture, grow in your theology, and then teach that theology to your children in simple ways. Don’t underestimate what your child can learn and what they can do. So, as your child asks a question, say something, you can answer it in a short theological statement. You know, when my kids get confused about, is why is there God, and why is there Jesus? I thought there was one God, and how many gods are we really talking about at this point? There’s the Spirit, and they get very confused. We just say Jesus is God, and we pray to God, and when we pray in Jesus’ name, we are talking to God. Prayer is talking to God. We just give these short theological statements, and it’s almost like these are hooks that we’re putting on the wall for them, and as they grow up, they’re going to hang more things on that hook. As we say, Jesus is God. Later in life, they’re going to learn that the Spirit is God. As they grow older, they’re going to learn that the Father is God, and that God is three persons in one, and they’re hanging that on the hook of the Trinity. And you didn’t even know that you gave it to them, that you didn’t even know that that was the hook of the Trinity when you taught them Jesus is God, but it gives them these anchors that they can come back to time and time again.

Anna Meade Harris
Tell us, if you would, about the Tiny Theologians Bible. How does that sort of help parents accomplish some of what you’re talking about?

Amy Gannett
I would love to tell you about the Tiny theologians Bible. This has been a passion project of mine. So, if you have run into me in our Tiny Theologians booth, or you’ve come to one of my sessions, you know I can gab about the Tiny Theologians Bible, because it’s a project that’s just so near and dear to my heart. What I wanted for families, what I wanted for my family was a Bible that would help kids graduate from a storybook Bible to a full text Bible, but I wanted it to be a Bible that would teach them biblical literacy as they make their way through it. So, imagine a study Bible, but for kids, so that when they come to a tricky verse, it helps them orient themselves to the big picture of scripture as they’re reading the intro verses to a new book of the Bible, they’re kind of clued into who the author is and maybe why that matters, but it’s in kid-sized language when they read a passage that is really difficult to read in the Old Testament, especially when you’re young and you don’t understand why the world is as. Broken as it is, it will give them a reorientation to God’s justice and His care for the lost. It’s going to help them see in the big picture who God is and His character, His attributes. Teach them the names of God, teach them biblical genre, and how we read poetry different than we read history, different than we read the gospel messages. So I wanted there to be a Bible that helped kids graduate from Storybook Bibles, and my hope is that if this is their first full-text Bible, it is far from their last, that they go on to love and read scripture for itself, and they just keep reading, and they just keep reading. The last thing we want is for kids to end up in high school or college or going to church, finding a church for the first time on their own, and realizing that all of this is unfamiliar to them because they’ve just heard these isolated stories from storybook Bibles, which again are a wonderful tool, but we also want them to know and love scripture itself, so that they keep growing and keep growing, so that’s why we made this Bible in particular.

Anna Meade Harris
Thank you, Amy. So Amy has talked to us about what it looks like to start well. It’s very every day, you keep it simple, it’s not a chore, it’s a delight. And I think all these things are really helpful when we’re busy moms and we’re trying to run the household, and it’s just really helpful to be encouraged in that way, but Chelsea, things get a little more complicated when you have teenagers, and teenagers are juggling so many competing voices from the culture, and it’s really helpful if they’ve already begun to listen to and recognize the voice of the Good Shepherd, as Amy talked about, if they know what His voice sounds like through His word, but it’s, it’s a daunting task. Chelsea, how do we continue to nurture biblical literacy in our teenagers? Yeah, well, I think our hope and prayer is that

Chelsea Kingston Erickson
more children would have this kind of robust entrance into studying the Bible that Amy is talking about, and if that’s the case, then those teenage years might be not easy, but the trajectory is maybe a little more simple, because you’re just continuing. That’s not always the case, though. You may feel, you may be sitting here thinking, my kids are older, and I didn’t do those things the way I wish I had. That’s probably all of us in this room. If you have older kids, actually, because we’re not going to do it perfectly, so there’s grace for that. But when I think about teaching teenagers to love God’s word, I think about Jesus on the road to Emmaus with his disciples, and he has this little Bible study with them, right? And what does it say in verse in Luke 2427 It says that he teaches them all the things concerning himself from the scriptures, meaning our Old Testament, and so he is doing just what Amy was saying, he’s connecting that story and he’s pointing it at himself as the fulfillment, and he is showing them that these are not, you know, in our case, where we’re reading the Old Testament and the New, these are not disparate stories, it’s one story. And I think that with teenagers, as they do graduate to reading the scripture, the whole text for themselves, we get to connect those dots even more. And actually, teenagers have a ton of questions about this. It’s something that’s motivated me to study the Old Testament more, because I would come to Bible study with teenagers and find that they wanted to know, well, is it, is it like a different God from the Old Testament to the New? What’s going on? Why, why are these, why do these stories seem a little bit different? Why is there this shift from the Old Testament to the New? And I think none of our churches are teaching that, but somehow they are, they’re intuiting that there’s a difference, and so they have a lot of questions, and we get to step into that as youth ministers and parents, and show them the connectivity between the two, and that is thrilling work. And in my experience, teenagers actually love to dig into that with you, if you can show them how. Look, how this New Testament passage is fulfilling this old testament prophecy. Look, how Jesus is the true and better Moses, or the true and better Adam. You know, show them those connections, and they, they get it, and that’s exciting to see the story. You know, their grasp of it as one story comes alive, and it’s really fun. So, you had many years as a youth pastor, and you saw lots of challenges and roadblocks to this biblical literacy with teenagers. What are some of those challenges? How can we overcome them, and where’s the hope? Yeah, great question. So, the challenges, you know, you probably sitting in this room feel them with us as we mentioned these, but as Anna said, you know, the competing voices become more and more, and in these generations that we’re discipling, it’s not just friends and teachers and textbooks, it’s actually TikTok, and it’s AI, and so the voices are many, and they are grabbing for attention, and it’s so hard, so we recognize that. And also families are just really busy, you’ve got travel sports and academic pressure, and you know, multiple two parents in the home may be working, or single parent homes, there are just lots of things that divide our attention. I think also, you know, sometimes kids can be a little rebellious about it, maybe they’re not, their heart isn’t warmed to the things of God in a particular season, and if some of you are feeling that, as moms, you know we see you, and we’re praying for all of you in the room that that God would work in your child’s life.

Chelsea Kingston Erickson
I think sometimes it can be to just an awkward fit at a particular youth group or church, maybe the student isn’t wanting to go, and so there’s some work there to do to draw them in and help them feel comfortable and a part of safe community, so that they can study the Bible with others, and then around our tables, at our breakfast table or our dinner table, you know, I’m in the same season Amy is right now, so my little guys are delighted to read a Bible story together, but as students age up into those teenage years, sometimes it can be really awkward, and you may just find yourself avoiding the eye rolls and the awgy mom, do we have to do this right now, because it just feels hard and awkward in a way that it doesn’t when they’re young, but with all of that said, you know, we want to name those things, we also want to just celebrate that I think there is a lot of hope right now, there’s always hope because of the gospel. We also see some really compelling studies lately that have given me a lot of encouragement as a youth minister and as a parent of younger kids. And the one that really stands out to me is the Barna study from several years ago about the open generation. They surveyed about 25,000 global teenagers, and what they found, the number of teenagers that were actively engaged with the Bible was only about 8% out of that number. So clearly, there’s a lot of good work to do, and a lot of prayers to pray for those students, but they found that 62% were actually open to the Bible. They had at least a neutral view of scripture, even if they never read it for themselves, and that number actually increased, I think, to 66% in the US. So that is incredibly hopeful. The other thing I want to correlate two things from that study that I think are really helpful for us as parents and as any youth workers that are in the room, they found that of the students who were actively engaged with the Bible, they had at least, they had an average of four adults who had helped them learn to study it, and kind of done that modeling that Amy talked about, and so I think, I think when we put those two things together, we see this correlation of, or just raises the question for me of how many more of those 62 or 66% would actually become Bible engaged if they just had an adult in their life who would draw them into that. Makes me think of the Ethiopian eunuch, and he says, How can I understand? He’s reading from the Old Testament, he says, How can I understand what I’m reading if I don’t have someone to guide me? And that’s the case for our teenagers. So I just want to reiterate that point about parents studying the word, my mom is here today, and she was a huge influence for me in that, I think, in a way that I probably didn’t realize at the time, but seeing her actively study her Bible, and she was a BSF substitute teaching leader, so sometimes I saw her really pouring over it to study and to teach others, and that had a huge impact on my life, so if you’re a mom, I just want to reiterate that, that, that is, and a spiritual mother as well. Let the, let the students that you’re discipling in your church or another context to see you love God’s word, and that will be impactful for them. And I think that’s one of those things that the study, you probably, we probably knew that intuitively, but the study really confirmed that. And then, if you’re a youth minister in the room, I would also say make the make the Bible the center of what you do in youth group. There’s so much pressure to be fun and funny and compelling and entertaining, and what I have found, I think that this study I mentioned really backs up is that students actually are really willing to come if they feel safe in community, they are willing to come and do a Bible study.

Chelsea Kingston Erickson
It doesn’t have to be complex, it doesn’t have to be rocket science, maybe have some food and create a warm community, focus on those things, but you don’t have to do messy games and chaotic stuff to get them to come have been amazed over the years of my ministry experience to see how much students really will gather around the Bible and the deep conversations that come when you engage it in a real way with them, so those would be my recommendations based on what we see in the culture,

Anna Meade Harris
really is the hope of the gospel is always there, always there, but there really is a lot of hope, and you know the spirit is moving, he’s never not at work. How does God with you resource teenagers and families in biblical literacy?

Chelsea Kingston Erickson
Well, we are so excited about this book, it was a dream project for us to do, we’re so thankful to the Sondervan team. Making it a reality, and we, our prayer is that it would help teenagers take that next step from being tiny theologians to being lifelong disciples of Jesus. We really pray that, and we did a couple of things to try to meet teenagers where they are, and also to help them go deep in their study of scripture, even in a short devotional, so on the kind of the practical engaging side, we really wanted to reach into their lived experience, and we have, so we have 55 authors, all of whom have extensive experience working with teenagers, either in youth ministry or as parents or in other capacities, and they really sought to be winsome in their kind of their opening illustration, something that would draw a teenager in and help them to feel that we see them, we see their experience, we know what it is to be in their shoes. We also, along that line, you know, we those lines, we also provide some discussion questions at the end and a prayer for each day. So those are just ways to try to draw the student in to what they’re reading, make it practical, and then on kind of the biblical literacy side, we really wanted this devotional. It’s 260 days, so that is five days a week, and we’ve given a little room for, you know, if you miss a day, you’re not off track. We thought that was important, but we really, in those 260 days, that 52 weeks of the year we really wanted to cover the whole story from Genesis to Revelation, and so we obviously can’t cover every passage, but we’ve identified our good coworker and founder of Rooted, Cameron Cole, had done some work to identify what are the benchmarks, what are the main things that a student would need to know, and so we’ve formatted the book so that it would cover those key passages of scripture, and we did it chronologically, that we felt that was really important for students to see the trajectory and the historical timeline. One other resource that’s really helpful in this regard is we were editing, I had, and Anna had always close at hand the casket empty materials that were mentioned, and so Dr. Carol Kaminsky has done some incredible work to outline, and we leaned heavily on her research and work to get that timeline in good shape, and to help students put together the whole story of the Bible. So that was one thing, and then we also.. I don’t know, there’s one more that I was going to say..

Anna Meade Harris
Old Testament tied to new testament.

Chelsea Kingston Erickson
Yes. Thank you, Hannah. It’s good to have my co-editor here. So we made sure that each passage referenced the old testament and the new, just to make sure that students would see those connections as they read through the 52 weeks.

Anna Meade Harris
Thank you. So I think one thing that we are all hearing is that discipling kids comes much easier if we ourselves as adults are being continuously formed by God’s word, and so I’m going to turn to Joe, who’s going to help us with that. Lots of adults in our churches feel stuck spiritually. You may have grown up in church, and yet maybe you find your engagement with scripture is plateaued, or you feel just kind of lukewarm, or like you’re checking a box. So, Joe, what does spiritual maturity in Bible engagement actually look like for an adult, and how is our aim a little different than it would be for children or adolescents.

Joe Carter
Yeah, there’s certain aspects that are the same for all at any stage of life. We need to know God, we need to trust God, we need to love God, we need to obey God, but those kind of tend to be, we tend to focus on one or the other in different stages. For example, in children, we tend to focus on, we want them to know the scriptures, we want to develop an affection for Jesus, so we talk about a lot about the Bible studies. We talk about how much Jesus loves them, and then when they become teenagers, we want to add to this conviction. We want them to make their faith their own, so they can answer questions like, Do I really believe this? Can I live this out, and things like that. But then, when we get to become adults, we’re like, well, I know the Bible stories, I made my faith my own, so now all I need to do is just need to start stacking up Bible knowledge. It’s almost like we expected we’re gonna get stopped on the street someday, and somebody’s like, “Who’s the witch of Endor? And you’re like, “I got this, I won. And, but, and so we just kind of like think we’re going this kind of maintenance mode, where this is just all we do, stack it, and Bible knowledge is absolutely essential. It’s very, very important, but it’s not the most important metric for our spiritual maturity. I would say a much better metric is what I call immediate obedience, that’s obeying what God’s telling you to. Somebody who’s reading the Bible should be able, should ask, what does this passage mean? Somebody who’s spiritually mature should also ask, what does Jesus want me to do with this, what I need to believe, what I need to act on. A child or a teen will read a passage about forgiveness. Spiritually mature adult will read that same passage and immediately think, I need.. I haven’t talked to my sister in two years. I need to call her right now and set this relationship right. That’s how we should think about immediately. It Jesus said, if you love me, you will keep my commands. Now, for us, our love language may be quality time, maybe words of affirmation. For Jesus, his love language is obedience. It’s doing what he says right when he says to do it. So we really want to grow spiritual maturity. We need to practice asking two questions: one, do I know what Jesus wants me to do, and to do that we really need to dig in our Bibles and really see what the whole scripture says we need to be doing, and also, am I willing and able to do what He’s called me to do, and if you’re willing, He’s going to give you the ability to do it, and I would say just doing asking these two questions and developing the habit of immediate obedience will direct dramatically change your spiritual trajectory.

Anna Meade Harris
Thank you. You wrote the notes for the Spiritual Habits Bible, and the title itself is making the claim that habits, not just intentions, are central to a maturing walk with God. So, why are.. why did you choose to frame adult discipleship around habits rather than devotions or experience or knowledge,

Joe Carter
yeah, knowledge, devotion, experiences, they’re all essential parts of the Christian life, but I think we tend to get them backwards, we tend to think, put them before the habits, and I think habits actually come first, what we tend to think is like, well, if I was just more devoted, I would want to read my Bible, if I was just had a little more knowledge, I’d be excited about reading scripture more, or if I come to a TGC conference, have this great experience, I’m going to go home, and I’m just going to be so in love with the word. But what happens is, we get there, and we, those things don’t happen. It’s because we don’t have the habits of doing these things. Once we develop the habits, then the routines will follow. We will become the kind of person who wants to do this, there’s an old saying that you are what you repeatedly do. If you’re repeatedly reading scripture, and you’re repeatedly praying, and you’re repeating, doing the habits of this over time, you’re going to become the kind of person who wants to do these things, who is good at doing these things. Now, we need to make clear that this is not having good spiritual habits does not automatically lead to sanctification. Sanctification is the work of the Holy Spirit, but we should be putting ourselves in the path of doing what God’s asked us to do. He’s asked us to do all these things, He’s asked us to do all these so that we can become more like Jesus. So we should want to do all these habits and develop the kind of habits so that we can become the kind of person that Jesus wants us to be,

Anna Meade Harris
so if a woman were to leave this session today and want to go deeper with her Bible, and not just read the Bible more, but actually mature in her love and devotion to it, and into obedience, is there a practice or shift, you could recommend.

Joe Carter
Yeah, there’s a practice I’ve put off for decades, and I think I never saw it as that important until just recently, when I really started, like probably the last couple years, really started practicing, and that’s memorization and meditation. In meditation, we often think it’s like, get it wrong, we think it’s like what we see on in yoga or on the meditation apps, where we kind of just empty our minds, but biblical meditation is when we fill our minds with God’s word, and then we just think about that. We see that in Psalm one, where He says the blessed person thinks about God’s word night and day. Joshua one talks about meditating on scripture day and night, and what this looks like is similar to what cows do. Now, cows will chew something, they’ll swallow it, they’ll spit it back up, and they’ll chew on it some more. That’s kind of a gross illustration, but that’s that is what we’re called to do in biblical meditation. In the word we get from that is ruminates. We’re called to ruminate on scripture, which means that we have to take it inside into our gut and then bring it back up and think about it some more, and just keep doing that over and over and over, and the best way to do that is by memorization. Now, you can’t really focus on a scripture if you don’t have it memorized. I know we think we’ve got it in our pockets, we can pull it out any time. There’s just something different about having that in our heads. And for the longest time, I just never did this because I’m just thought I’m not good at memorization. And what I realized, though, is there is a way that I’m good at memorization, and that’s remembering song lyrics. Now, I could probably pick out a song that you went, your favorite song from high school, it could be 20 years, and you just know the lyrics automatically. There’s something about God’s work that God does that He makes it easier to remember words when they’re attached to music. And so, a couple of last late last year, one of my favorite pastor friends said he knows I like R and B music, and he says there’s a Spotify playlist that has RB albums on there. What they do is they just take passage of scripture, like four to 20 verses, and it says it to an AI sings it. It’s like the most amazing use of AI I’ve ever seen, and I know it sounds ridiculous. It sounds kind of silly, a pastor listened to R and B scriptures, but it’s I’ve listened to the book of James over and over and over, and now it’s less like embedded in my head. I’ll be driving down the road, or I’ll be falling asleep, and all sudden I like count it all joy, my brothers, and next thing you know, I’m just singing the whole thing, and I’m like starting to think of. What does this mean? What does it mean? So R and B may not be your thing. There’s plenty of other things. Shane and Shane’s got a lot of psalms on there, so just start listening to those over and over and over until you get those in your head, get them memorized, and then just meditate on it. What does God want me to do with this, with this, with this word? Oh,

Anna Meade Harris
that’s so good. Thank you, Joe. So we have, we have moved through the discipleship journey from childhood to adulthood. I’m going to ask each panelist to share, if you could give one piece of discipleship wisdom to people who are shaping the next generation, which I think a lot of us in this room are, what would it be? And I’m actually going to jump in here myself and just give my answer to this question before I then pivot to Joe, Chelsea, then Amy. I’m going to say, give your young people, your children, and teenagers actual physical Bibles. I just can’t state how important I think this is. I recently was cleaning out my adult son’s room. Yeah, why I’m doing that, I don’t know, but but it was, and I found the Bible that he had used in middle school and high school, and I opened it up and was thumbing through it, and just tears pouring, and I saw the notes that he’d written, and what he’d underline, and the question marks in there, and questions he’d actually written, written, and a couple of places where he had written something like, Thank you, Jesus, you know, in the margin, and I actually closed it, because I thought, I feel like I’m reading his diary, it was so personal, and he’s 27 years old now, and probably hasn’t looked at that Bible in nearly 10 years, you know, he doesn’t live in at home anymore, and he has a Bible where he is, and I’ve been praying about the right time to give that back to him, where it might be an encouragement to him to see kind of the story of where he was with God in high school. What was he talking to God about? What jumped out to him in scripture, and I just don’t think there’s anything more precious than that testimony. When he opens it up, he will see part of his history of his walk with God in his own handwriting, and there’s just to me nothing that can replace that tactile experience of holding an actual Bible. I mean, if you want to give them colored pens, markers, highlighters, what it’s sticky things, whatever it is to make it more fun, or whatever, but that’s a gift to have a physical Bible. So, Joe, what would you say about discipling the next generation?

Joe Carter
Yeah, I would say don’t give in to imposter syndrome. And in this context, what I mean is we tend to think I’m not qualified to disciple somebody, I don’t know enough, and when they find out they’re going to be embarrassed that I fooled them into thinking I knew stuff. If God put somebody in your life to disciple, He’s going to give you the ability, and to do this. Not, you got to do the hard work. You need to study your study, God’s word. You need to follow Christ in ways that develop that, but you can do it. It’s often kind of like if you were trying to teach high elementary school kids, PE, you don’t need to be an Olympic sprinter, you just need to run a little bit faster than them, and same thing when you disciple somebody, you don’t need to be the world’s greatest theologian, you just need to be a little bit more than them, just study a little bit more than them, and be honest, I’ll give you a cigarette, that’s what most of us pastors do, like when you email us something, it’s not that we know so much more, we got 30 minutes in Google, we’re gonna figure it out, and we’ll get back to you. So, don’t be afraid to say I don’t know, but I’m gonna find out for you, and I’m gonna get back. And the reason why they need you to do it rather than do it for themselves, because hopefully you know what resources to trust, you know where the right answer is gonna be found. You’re not gonna see them wrong, because God’s put you in their life to do that for them.

Chelsea Kingston Erickson
Well, I want to piggyback off that a little bit, and just say I think in youth ministry there’s a lot of temptation to only teach kind of from the front to students, and I really want to encourage people, whether it’s in your home or in your church setting, to really gather around the Bible with teenagers and help them learn to study it for themselves, and as you do that, they’re going to have a lot of questions, and that’s great. Teenagers sometimes ask the questions that we don’t think to ask, because we, you know, it feels so familiar, or that we’re afraid to ask because we might sound silly, and they just go for it. And I think when that happens, we have an opportunity to say, to be honest, when we don’t know, and to say, well, let’s figure it out together, let’s research together. Here are some good sources, and to take them into that process with you, because they’re going to need that for the rest of their lives as lifelong disciples.

Amy Gannett
I would just add that in the little years, do not despise the day of small things. God gave that. Warning to his people in scripture, and he gives that warning to us too. It’s easy for us to think that in order to begin being intentional to disciple our children or to teach them biblical literacy, that we need to all of a sudden create this new schedule for our families. We’re going to have this time that we sit down and read scripture together every day, and I need to buy all these resources that are maybe, and maybe not, within my budget, and maybe you like start getting frustrated with your house, because you’re like, I wish we could do to our kitchen table, but it’s, you know, a wonky space for that, and I wish we had a bigger space, and all of a sudden it’s like you have to overhaul your entire life in order to disciple your kids, it can feel that way, can’t it? But the Lord has seen fit that you are entrusted to these, entrusted with these little ones, and He chose you. You were His plan A to disciple the kids in your home, and He thought you were the best one for the job, and He knows exactly where you are, exactly what your budget is, exactly what resources you have, exactly the shape and size of your home, exactly the ages of your kids, and he has called you not to overhaul everything, but to use every little tiny moment as an opportunity to disciple these little ones. So, my best encouragement is that if you want to start a habit, start really small, because small is sustainable, and as you do something over the long haul, the Lord’s going to use it to bear fruit.

Anna Meade Harris
I love that there’s a lot of grace in that too. There’s a lot of grace, and there is always the grace of Jesus in all of this, because none of us are going to have all the answers for our kids. None of us are going to keep to a perfect schedule. We ourselves struggle with these habits. We ourselves don’t always feel like getting into the word, and sometimes our love feels cold, and there is grace for that. We can go and ask God to give us a hunger and a thirst, and He will. That is a question, a prayer He is delighted to answer. So, in all of this, in all of this, remember the grace of Jesus. There is no doing it perfectly. Remove that from your list of requirements for yourself, because you will not get started if, if you have to do it perfectly, and Jesus did everything perfectly for you, so you are freed to just pursue him and let him meet you, and he will. It’s his delight. So, thank you so much for being here. We really are appreciative of your being here. And don’t forget, there’s that postcard on your seat, and that will give you the titles of the books, and they’re available in the bookstore. Thank you again to Zondervan. Y’all have been wonderful, and I’d like to let y’all know, I am going to pray for us. I’d like to let y’all know that Chelsea and I are going to be able to be in the bookstore at the Zondervan booth at 5o’clock if you want to come by and chat with us. So, we would love to meet you. Stop by if you don’t mind. Let me pray for us. Father God, we are humbled and awed that you have chosen to reveal yourself to us through your word we ask that you give us that ever increasing hunger and thirst from your word. For your word we ask that nothing else will satisfy as much as much as drawing close to you through the pages of our Bible. We ask that you free us from the needing to do it, needing to do it well or perfect, and just cause us to love you, and I pray that we would study our Bibles and teach children and teenagers our Bibles, because we love you. We pray for those young ones in our care that our passion for your word would grow, and it would be contagious, and that alongside us they would grow in faith and maturity through reading and study your scriptures. Above all, we love you, Jesus, and it’s in your holy name we pray. Amen. Thank you so much.