How to Give Your Child a Vocabulary of Faith

“If you just teach them words, it’s just going to be words, but that’s true of any human learning a language. First you learn the word, and then you learn the meaning behind it. So you might teach a child ‘hot,’ and not until they touch the stove do they truly discover its meaning. But that doesn’t mean we don’t give them vocabulary. We must give them language to understand their experiences.” — Lucy Olson

Date: June 15, 2018

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Event: The Gospel Coalition 2018 Women’s Conference, Indianapolis, Indiana

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Find more audio and video from The Gospel Coalition 2018 Women’s Conference on the conference media page.

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.

But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.

To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.

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Betsy Childs Howard is an editor for The Gospel Coalition. She is the author of Seasons of Waiting and the children’s books Arlo and the Great Big Cover-Up and Polly and the Screen Time Overload. Betsy and her husband, Bernard, live with their two little boys in Birmingham, Alabama, where Bernard is the pastor of Grace Church Birmingham.

Melanie Lacy is the executive director of Growing Young Disciples and the director of theology for children’s and youth ministry training at Oak Hill College, London. She was the chief writer for The New City Catechism Curriculum.

Lucy Olson is a clinical psychologist Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she lives with her husband and four children. She is the co-author of Oh, the Treasures You’ll Know! You can follow her in her gray mini van — the one with duct tape on the door.

Irene Sun was born in Malaysia and is the author of the picture books Taste and See: All About God’s Goodness and God Counts: Numbers in His Word and His World. She studied liturgy and literature at Yale University (MAR) and Old Testament and Semitic languages at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (ThM). She now teaches her four boys at home with her preacher husband, Hans. They joyfully belong to Pittsburgh Chinese Church.