3 Keys to Talking with Your Kids About Who Jesus Is
By Natasha Crain
With so many competing ideas about who Jesus is in the world, how can we help our kids know which one is correct? Natasha Crain offers three keys to having impactful conversations with children about the essential foundation of our faith: the identity of Jesus.
When I graduated from college, I realized that I hadn’t taken my faith very seriously for a while. I decided I needed to spend time studying Christianity more deeply, so I headed to my local bookstore’s “Christian” section one morning.
I eventually settled on a book called Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography by New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan. I liked the idea of learning more about Jesus’s historical context. I returned home eager to reinvigorate my fledgling faith.
The cover of the book described it as a “startling account of what we can know about the life of Jesus.” And it delivered on that claim—I was completely startled by what I read. According to this book, Jesus wasn’t who I thought he was at all! He was a peasant who didn’t perform the many miracles in the Gospels, didn’t die for the sins of humankind, and didn’t physically rise from the dead. The only thing that made him extraordinary was how he lived.
I was confused. Here was someone who identified himself as a Christian but in his scholarly work described a Jesus who was nothing like the Jesus I had always known. And as far as I could tell from the book, most scholars agreed with Crossan’s assessment. I distinctly remember wondering, Was everything I learned in church all those years wrong, or did I profoundly misunderstand what I was taught?
Other Views on Who Jesus Was
What I didn’t know at the time was that Crossan is the cofounder of the now famous Jesus Seminar, whose Fellows met regularly to debate the authenticity of various words and deeds attributed to Jesus and to cast votes to obtain consensus. They eventually concluded that only about 18 percent of Jesus’s sayings and 16 percent of his deeds (as recorded in the Gospels) are authentic. The Jesus who remained—like the Jesus in Crossan’s book—was unrecognizable compared to the Jesus I grew up worshiping in church.
The Jesus Seminar isn’t the only group with an understanding of Jesus’s identity that differs from what the Bible says, of course. There are many diverse ideas today of who Jesus is:
- Some believe he never existed.
- Some believe he was a failed Messiah.
- Some believe he was simply a good moral teacher or someone who had unique spiritual insights but never claimed to be God.
- Some believe he was a special part of God’s plan in the world (even a “savior” in some cases) but not God himself.
With so many competing ideas of who Jesus is, how can we know which one is correct? That’s the fundamental question we need to help our kids answer, and it’s the question I wasn’t prepared to address when I picked up Crossan’s book . . . despite having spent hundreds of hours in church.
An Essential Foundation for Our Kids: Jesus’s Identity
As parents, we often focus more on the teachings of Jesus than on his identity because we’re preoccupied with the task of shaping our kids’ behavior. When we’re faced with the daily parenting drama of kids fighting, lying, gossiping, hitting, cheating, back talking, yelling, and so on (all before 9 a.m., of course!), we have a multitude of natural opportunities to share how Jesus taught us to live.
It feels less natural to inject conversations into the mix about who Jesus is and how we can know who he is. But that doesn’t make doing so any less important.
Let’s be clear: if Jesus was only a human, his teachings are no more authoritative for our kids’ most recent behavioral issue than those of our next-door neighbor. Jesus’s identity is foundational to everything we believe as Christians.
Three Keys to Impactful Conversations about the Identity of Jesus
1. Establish the importance of Jesus’s identity before beginning these conversations. For kids who have grown up in a Christian home or who have spent a lot of time in a Christian church, the identity of Jesus as God is often a foregone conclusion—so much so that they may never have considered the implications of that fact. Share examples from this overview about other Jesus beliefs and discuss how those beliefs result in people having very different worldviews.
2. Make it clear that Jesus’s identity isn’t a matter of blind belief. When you introduce competing ideas of who Jesus is, your child might assume that everyone just has to choose the belief that makes the most sense to them. It’s important for them to understand, however, that we should form our beliefs about Jesus’s identity based on the evidence we have. Knowing who Jesus is doesn’t mean we blindly pick a belief but rather that we search for what is true of him.
3. Emphasize how Jesus’s identity is what makes him relevant to our lives today. Skeptics like to say they don’t care about a book written two thousand years ago or about a man who lived then. If Jesus were just another human, perhaps what he taught two thousand years ago would be irrelevant today. But if Jesus is God incarnate—perfectly knowing the past, present, and future—then what he taught couldn’t be more important, no matter how long ago it was.
The identity of Jesus is crucial—for our faith and for our children’s.
This article has been adapted from Natasha Crain’s book Talking with Your Kids About Jesus: 30 Conversations Every Christian Parent Must Have, published by Baker Books. In the book she equips Christian parents to have the faith conversations that matter most.
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Natasha Crain is a national speaker, author, and blogger who is passionate about equipping Christian parents to raise their kids with an understanding of how to make a case for and defend their faith in an increasingly secular world. She is also the author of other apologetics books for parents including Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side and Talking with Your Kids about God.
