Welcome to Curiously Caitlin, where we usually take a kid question about God, theology, or the Bible, and find a scholar to answer it.

This week, we are introducing a new series of episodes we're calling Kids Say the Most Heretical Things, where we flip the script and begin not with kid questions, but with kid answers.

I believe that the church needs to learn not only from the big questions that kids have about God, but from their answers, too.

I have been teaching little kids in church for a long time now, from the time I was in high school,

through college, over years working professionally in children's ministry,

to now in my doctoral program where I still spend a lot of my time with little kids on

Sunday mornings. And I have learned so much from kids. Their questions have helped me think more

deeply about who God is. And every week, I wonder with the kids. And they often come up with incredible

ideas about God. Sometimes they are funny. Sometimes they're surprisingly poignant and beautiful.

Sometimes they're not quite right, but they force me to think better about why we believe what we believe. Their answers also tell me

something about what they have picked up along the way in church, including the things we didn't

mean to teach them, but maybe we accidentally did. Maybe some of the things that you learned in church,

and remember, as a grown-up to this day, are not necessarily the things

people wanted you to learn. Kids can help us understand or realize for the first time things that

we didn't know we were teaching along the way, but that were some of the most important things

they ended up keeping with them. So this series, kids say the most heretical things, is not trying

to call out kids for their bad theology. Besides, we haven't even called a council to convict them

of actual heresy. It's all about listening to their answers, to big, important questions,

and hearing where they're surprisingly right and interrogating where they might get

things wrong. We need to listen to kids because they show us what we're actually teaching in the

church. And they might actually help us correct where we've gotten some things wrong.

I don't know.

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