ROC – Reading the Bible to our children

14 November 2019

With God’s Grace, the mothers’ and children’s group met yesterday at the Monastery. We are very grateful to Fr Eleftherios Gerovasilis, who was our guest speaker, discussing with us the topic “Reading the Bible to our children”.

A question parents often ask is how to read the Bible to their children, especially when they are very young? Here, picture books are important.

Pictures and Holy Icons have a significant role in our Church. In the early years of the Church, when people in their great majority couldn’t read or write, the faith was expressed and conveyed with pictures and Icons depicting stories: the Creation of the world, parables and other stories from the Bible. The first thing that catechumens were taught was the Creation story.

We can start teaching the Bible to children in this way, with the creation story. When we teach young children that God created the sun whose warmth we can feel, the flowers and the birds we can see and hear, it helps them to engage their senses. We can also talk to them about the parables, which teach them the right from the wrong, the good from the bad. Try not to complicate things at first, not to confuse them, but to use simple terms according to their age, and make it interesting and fun for them.

And it is important to do so from a very young age. Children, from the time they are babies, try to imitate us. They look at our face, our lips, and they move theirs in an effort to mimic our sounds and motions.

From that young age, when their hearts are open to us and they accept what we give them, we should try to show them Christ and our faith. The pictures they see as they grow, the stories they hear from us, are engrafted in their minds, and they can remember them to their adulthood. And then they often tell them to their own children.

Reading the Bible to our children is part of the general effort we make as parents to bring up our children within the spirit of Orthodoxy, to inspire to them the love of Christ. This, together with singing and chanting to them, getting them to kiss the Icons in our home Icon corner and at Church, burning incense in our house, are all practices that will help them to get more familiar with the Church and more comfortable when they go to Church.

Take your children to Church to attend the Liturgy and to receive Holy Communion every Sunday. Get them used to Sunday morning going to church. The Church is our true home that needs to be engrafted in our hearts – and this can easily happen when we as parents take our children to Church every week and dedicate the Sunday mornings to this.

For young kids, let them have a good meal and play, then take them to Church closer to Holy Communion, so they get used to the environment of the Church for Sunday mornings and to taking Holy Communion, without getting tired – and this is both for the children and the parents, who often can get exhausted tending to their young children at Church.

Make Sunday a special day of the week dedicated to God. Do fun things with them after Church, give them things to look forward to. It’s important for the children, but also for the parents, to get all together as a family on Sundays, attend the Liturgy and participate, and then spend a fun day together.

We should remember that waves will always come in our lives. We have to build a firm foundation on Christ. So when the waves come over, they don’t wash off our foundations. All the efforts and hardships we may go through as parents in order to raise our children in Orthodoxy are working towards our salvation and also our children’s salvation. That is our aim and our only goal: living a spiritual life in the world, focused on the Eternal Life and the Resurrection; a life which through the adversities and the difficulties will lead us to our salvation and the salvation of the whole humanity.