Faith in Preschoolers: The Place of Imagination
Originally published at Youthworks.net on 7th January, 2021. © Youthworks 2021.
Many years ago, as a young leader, I was placed in charge of the preschool room of our Sunday morning Children’s Ministry. These mornings were filled with song, play, dance, pictures, puppets, paddle pop sticks, cotton wool, craft glue, and the glitter that never come out of that carpet.
In amongst all these hands-on experiences, the centralizing focus of course was helping these young disciples to know, love and follow Jesus as their King and their friend.
One of my clearest memories was the time I decided to take the preschoolers through the Fruit of the Spirit. “Brilliant”, I thought. Clear application for little hearts, with a clear visual of something from their everyday lives. There are plenty of fruit related games and craft, and best of all there are nine spiritual characteristics, which is perfect for a term’s worth of curriculum. We made a large cardboard tree at the front of the room, and each week added a different fruit to the tree—apple, orange, pear, grapes—with the characteristic of the week written on it.
Everything was going well, or so I thought, until I got some feedback from one of the parents. It appears that what I was trying to teach had not been the lesson that was learnt by everyone in the group. Little Jessica had gone home and declared with authority that God did not want her to eat sandwiches or pasta for dinner. God only wants us to eat fruit!
As I’ve continued in ministry, and as I visit and advise other church leaders, I’ve come to see that my younger self had fallen into one of two common mistakes on either side of the preschool discipleship spectrum.
One mistaken approach is to presume that preschool children are too young to learn about faith. This approach results in programs that offer fun, games and craft but very little in terms of Christian faith development.
The other mistaken approach—the one which my team and I had stumbled into—is to presume too much of the preschool children only offering them biblical teaching that was beyond their developmental ability. Preschool children are rarely capable of making the cognitive jump between the analogy of fruit on a tree, and the Spirit-filled characteristics that God is growing in the lives of believers.
So how can we help to disciple these young believers in a way that both honours their status as sons and daughters of the King, but which also honours the way in which God has created their still developing minds, imaginations, affections, and actions?
Reggie Joiner and Kristen Ivy describe the preschool years—3 and 4 year old’s—as,
“The phase when anything can be imagined, everything can be a game, and one curious preschooler wants to know “Why?”.[1]
This article will focus particularly on imagination, and the questions that this often raises for preschool ministry leaders.
Imagination and Discipleship
Imagination provides opportunities to enter into other worlds, to be someone else, to try out other personalities. Preschoolers generally like stories, and imagining themselves within the story, acting the part, playing along and making up where the story might go next. In terms of faith development, this provides us with the opportunity to familiarize preschoolers with the narratives of Scripture. Enter into the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, build bricks for Pharaoh, march around the walls of Jericho with Joshua’s army, sit in the belly of the whale with Jonah, walk across the water with Peter towards Jesus, be fed with the bread from five loaves and two fish, walk in sadness towards the tomb, and run back with the joy, wonder and amazement of it being found empty.
Children, perhaps even better than adults, can imagine themselves in these stories and act out the roles and experience the scene. Living in the stories of scripture will help shape the Christian moral life of the preschool disciple. Learning to wonder at God’s creation, cry at the injustice of slavery, rejoice at the fulfilment of God’s promised, reflect on the consequence of sin, marvel at the divinity of Jesus, mourn his death and rejoice in his resurrection are all important for moulding the minds and hearts of preschoolers in the model of faithful discipleship.
Truth or Fiction?
However, there are some limitations to the preschooler’s imagination, which may worry the parent or leader. One characteristic of this moment in childhood is often the inability to differentiate between truth and fiction. As adults we have a clear boundary between fantasy and history. This boundary is not as clear to preschoolers. Peter Pan flying to Neverland may be just as real to them as Jesus walking on water.
A second characteristic of a child’s imaginative engagement with stories is that the order of stories and events may be largely irrelevant. Ordering the narratives in the biblical canon and the importance of a Biblical Theology of creation-fall-redemption-consummation will not be concepts that come naturally to this age group.
Neither of these concerns ought to worry the parent or leader of the preschool child at this stage of their development. This is not to say that truth does not matter, nor that establishing the foundations of a biblical theology is wasted time. For example, a Children’s Bible that accurately narrates the stories of Scripture from within a clear ‘Big Story’ perspective is still preferable to one that treats each episode as a disconnected fable, embellished with free flowing poetic license. However, leaders ought not to be concerned that their 4-year-old jumps between Neverland and Nazareth, or when they tell you that Jesus brings five loaves and two fish to the last supper.
This is because, for preschoolers and adults alike, the end goal of discipleship is not narrative accuracy, but Christ-shaped followers of the King. This is where my teaching of the Fruit of the Spirit broke down for the children in my Sunday School class. My concern had been on teaching the language of Paul’s analogy, more than on shaping the children’s imaginations with the Christ-shaped vision of a Spirit-filled discipleship that Paul is exhorting the Galatians to live out.
Our preschoolers can, and do, have faith. It is our responsibility to plant the seed, water and cultivate healthy faith development, knowing that it is God who ultimately grows the faith of these little ones (1 Cor. 3:5-9). But our preschool brothers and sisters are preschool brothers and sisters and their discipleship is—God willing—a long term project. As children grow into the primary school years, they will learn to differentiate history and fiction and they will grow in their capacity to sequence events and the significance of this in biblical theology. But regardless of age, we can help all disciples to know, love and follow King Jesus in ways that reflect their age and development.
[1] Joiner and Ivy (2015) It’s Just A Phase So Don’t Miss It. Cumming, GA.: Orange.