My wife and I just returned from “The largest Christian homeschool conference in the Northeast.”  We eagerly anticipated this event, and it didn’t disappoint.

So many benefits came from the time.  We were able to get our hands and eyes on many curriculum options, finally choosing what we will use for the coming school year.  We couldn’t even wait for the Fall to begin; as soon as we got home, we unwrapped a few things and immediately did the first of the new lessons with our children.  They just loved it, and our energy was still high from the buzz of the convention.

This blog isn’t about homeschooling, though, but about Bible study.  So, to get to the point: what I learned about Bible study is that we need much more of it.

At the convention, we heard a number of talks on various topics: publishing, storytelling, simultaneously instructing children of different grade levels, and including the preschoolers in homeschool time.  The last session we attended was especially helpful, in that the speaker (Marilyn Boyer of Character Concepts) listed about 30 character qualities, from the Bible, that we should seek to instill in our children.  She gave loads of tips on how to help our children connect with the Scriptures on a heart level, through memorizing them, meditating on them, and applying them to all of life’s adventures.

What I found noteworthy was that, other than this final session, the Bible was almost completely absent from the other workshops we attended.  To be fair, we could only attend a small fraction of the workshops, and perhaps we chose the only ones weaker on Scripture.

But I can’t help myself thinking that if “Christian homeschooling” can get dislodged from its moorings in careful biblical study, it’s merely symptomatic of Christian culture at large, which can be saturated with morals and activities but be somewhat barren when it comes to understanding God’s Knowable Word.

I’ll list just one other symptom that struck me.  Among the hundreds of vendors, we must have seen dozens of Bible curricula for children and teenagers.  This encouraged us.  However, almost every sample we perused focused on either the Bible’s stories, its ethics, or its theology.

These three are important topics, but what I’d also like to see is training for children and teens in how to study the Bible.  My hope for our children is that by the time they graduate high school, they won’t need a Bible text book anymore.  I’m not saying they’ll have perfect knowledge of all things, independent of the Christian community or the preaching of God’s Word.  I just mean that I’d like them to be able to pick up their Bibles, read them profitably, understand them rightly, and be equipped to use them to change the world.