Helping your whole family enjoy the Bible

Many parents desire to have a daily time together as a family to read the Bible and pray but find it a struggle to do so. I have just had Australian friends visit me with their three children – 2 sons (11, 12) and an 8 year old daughter. While they were here I wanted them to experience storying for themselves and see what a difference it could make to their family devotions.

We used 4 days and covered the stories in Daniel 1-6. Three days they simply heard the story and discussed it. The fourth they also learned the days story. Discussion was based around 5 questions:

1) What is your faviourite part of the story? Why?

2) What questions do you have about this story? (we just raised them and didn’t necessarily answer them because if they aren’t answered we tend to keep thinking about them).

3) What do we learn about people from this story?

4) What can we learn about God?

5) As a result of hearing this story, what do I want to see changed in my life starting this week?

Initially I wrote these 5 questions on pieces of paper. We took turns asking a question and the rule was that if you asked the question you didn’t have to answer unless you want to (this assures no lack of volunteers!) Answers couldn’t be repeated and so the game was on to answer quickly and then force the others to think hard to come up with a new answer.

On the final day, we all learned in three different ways how to tell the Daniel 6 story.

Method 1 – Comprehension questions

First we asked detailed questions that guided us through reviewing the story including, “How does this story start?” “What did the king want to do?” “How did his other officials feel about this?” “What did they do…what did X so and how did Y reply…”

Method 2 – Group Telling

Someone starts at the beginning of the story and tells a few sentences then passes to the next person and they continue around the group. You can say, “Pass” if you can’t remember. Everyone in the group (usually naturally) corrects (“that wasn’t quite what he said …”). Group practice helps people to correct any inaccuracies.

Method 3 – Pairs Practice

The group breaks into pairs and each tells the whole story from the beginning with the more confident person going first so that the other person has another opportunity to hear the whole story. This process might seem tedious but the discussion is usually even better once you’ve heard and told the story 4-5 times.

What encouraged us about this experience:

* Everyone was keen to participate each day and one of the boys was constantly asking when we could hear the next story.

* We did stories at natural times -during a meal and even waiting for a bus

* The discussion from every age group was deep but also a lot of fun.

* Every age group was challenged

* The discussion was practical and began to be applied immediately in people’s lives.

* It built a real sense of community as we had a 4 day church

*** A set of six Daniel stories can be listened to/viewed***