“Biblical literacy is a precursor to biblical transformation.”

“More than 200 million people have no access to spiritual food, with no Scriptures in their own language,” says Krish Kandiah, a director at the Evangelical Alliance UK. “Yet we in the West, despite owning more Bibles per household than we will ever use, are slowly starving to death because we have lost our appetite for Scripture.”(CT article May 2010)

These quotes and much more reading sparked my interest into a deeper look at biblical literacy and why it matters.  Raising children in today’s culture presents itself with a myriad of challenges and obstacles.  Each one is it’s own blog post (or book!).  But what my husband and I were increasingly aware of, even before having children when we led jr high ministry, was that we rarely observed young people with passion for God’s word or even an appetite for it at all.  Like Kandiah states above, we’ve got more Bibles that the rest of the world but we, in general, aren’t feasting on it and most don’t even know what it says.

How can the Bible change our life when we’ve got no idea what it actually says?  How can we attempt to live like Jesus when we’re just making a best guess as to what he would do?  How can we share the incredible story of Hope that was meant for all mankind if we can’t even articulate the message?

We can’t.  And this is why it matters that we know what mysteries and miracles the Bible holds.

In this quest for how to facilitate this in our own family and in our lives, several things popped up.

1. We invested in the Bible on CD (actually I asked for it for my birthday) and it is deeply blessing our family
2. We implemented a very simple reading time (like only a few verses) after dinner every night
3. We prayed for new ideas on leading children in the church setting since we’re about to jump in with both feet joining a new church that is just beginning

That last prayer led us on a fascinating journey and discovery of a way of teaching the Bible to children called Godly Play.  My next post will explain what that looks like and share about our one-day training yesterday.