Hey folks! Our current unit in the kids curriculum is about the Apostle's Creed. We'll be in this unit until the beginning of Advent!
The Apostles Creed forms one of the three main catechetical tools of the Church from its earliest days. For hundreds of years, persons were taught the faith through the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments. This Fall we’ll be walking through the articles of the Creed to get our kids oriented to the “faith once for all delivered to the saints”!
Traditionally, the Church has used the Apostle’s Creed as the bedrock of what ought to be believed about God, the story the Bible tells and our future hope.
The word “creed” is an English transliteration from the latin “credo,” meaning, “I believe.” Creeds in the Christian tradition have always functioned s summary statements of belief, and have been developing and for use in the Church since the very beginning of the Church’s life.
What we call the Apostle’s Creed is the finished version of an extremely early Christian doctrinal statement sometimes referred to as the “Old Roman Creed,” dating from the early 100s. For context, St. John the Apostle died in the year 100 AD. The Creed began to take the shape it has now in the middle of the fourth century (300s AD), and the Creed as we now know it was firmly established in use in the Western Church by the year 413. It was officially recognized as a Creed of the Church by the Emperor Charlemagne in the early 800s.
Notably, the Apostle’s Creed is a particularly Western phenomenon: the Eastern Church does not use it, though it is in complete agreement with the more Catholic Nicene Creed. However, the Apostle’s Creed has been in use in some form in the West for nearly the entirety of the churches life and has played a particularly important role in ancient baptismal liturgies: it was the common baptismal practice for the baptismal candidate to be dunked three times in water, each time proclaiming “Credo!” as the priest asked if he or she believed in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As such, the Apostles Creed, and in particular its first line, has been appropriately called the “birth cry of the Christian.”
This week we’re going to talk about just those words: I believe.
Belief involves at least two things: conviction and trust.
Belief is a fundamental component to the nature of the Christian life, and yet is often misunderstood. On the one hand belief is often understood as an intellectual conviction of truthfulness. In this sense, it is an expression of an individual’s conviction that this or that is true. On the other hand, belief is very much also tied to trust: “I believe you,” we say when we trust someone’s account of an experience.
We should never tire of the great gospel promise in John 3:16: “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” This is the whole story in summary form: God loves us, gives himself to us, and through belief we are given eternal life. And so the Christian life starts and ends with belief: both conviction and trust.
But it is also true that conviction and trust ebb and flow, trust sometimes increases and is sometimes strained. And so while belief (conviction and trust) need to be insisted upon as a necessary ingredient to the Christian life, it is also true that belief is often entangled with unbelief. And so we should also never tire of the story of Jesus and the desperate father of Mark 9, who says with honesty that has been the balm of millions of people throughout the centuries, “I believe! Help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).
Scripture to consider:
John 3:1-16
Mark 9:14-27
Questions for your kids
What does it mean to "believe" in Jesus?
Do you think the story the Bible tells about Jesus is true? Why or why not?
What does it mean to believe and have "unbelief" at the same time (like the father in the Mark 9 story)?
Holy Imagination
Learning the faith isn't just about memorizing facts. It's about seeing the world as it really is: "charged with the grandeur of God."
Tell your kids a story about your childhood. Could be about anything as long as its true. As them when you're done if they believe you. Why or why not? Tie this back to believing Jesus: we're convinced what is said about him is true, and we trust that he is who he says he is.
Peace,
Danny+