I know we write these as a way of encouraging family worship – but if your family has older children / youth then please feel free to use the regular Bible Study material!
But if you have younger children, how can we get into this idea of the Church being rooted in the Apostles? There are a couple of idea: the first would be to build on the very visual image of the Apostles as the foundation of the Church (Eph.2:20, with Prophets simply be those who did the same job as the Apostles prior to the Incarnation of Christ).
Here’s a simple picture of the image in Eph.2:20 that might help:
Eph.2:19-20 would also make a great memory verse. Here’s a shortened version: ‘You are ... members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone’.
To introduce the idea of making sure we can recognise the Apostles’ teaching, why not have a game where you read a popular saying or sentence and people have to decide if it is Apostle or not Apostle... (cleanliness is next to godliness? The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat?)
How can we get better at knowing what the Apostle’s teach (and what they don’t teach!)?
Another way in might be to think of keeping something safe. You could entrust something fragile to one member of the family, who keeps it for a day, then passes it on to the next person... can it be kept safe till the end of the week? This is a great picture of the Church as it passes on the Apostolic teaching from one generation to another through the ages. How do we know when it is being kept safe? ...and when it isn’t?
There are plenty of kid-friendly animations of the story of Apostle Paul’s missionary journeys on Youtube. One of them – covering Acts 10-28 - can be found here.
with older children, you could take a letter written by an Apostle (i.e. any of the NT epistles) and begin to introduce them to the idea of learning from a passage about the Apostle and what they teach. If you are using Eph.2:20 as a memory verse, why not take the whole chapter over the course of a few days, and explore some of the big ideas Paul is teaching, and what we are learning about him from what he writes there. What does he teach us about sin, and the cross, and the Church? What does he teach us about God and what God is doing through Jesus and why? Just take it one section at a time, read it aloud as a family (you might find it helpful to make sure everyone has a copy of that section in front of them).
In Explorers and youth group Bible studies, we often ask the y.p. to draw:
a question mark beside anything they don’t understand...
an exclamation mark against something they didn’t expect...
a light bulb next to new ideas...
a deja-vu sign for anything they have heard before, or recognise from somewhere else in the Bible (see below)…
an arrow to note something we have to do…
a heart next to something they love or get excited about in the passage.
That sort of thing might be a helpful way to get people talking about what you are reading...
