An Interview with Natasha Crain
Author of the new book Talking With Your Kids About Jesus
Greetings! We hope you enjoy this bonus article from the recently published April issue of The Worldview Bulletin. Amy Davison interviews Natasha Crain about her new book Talking With Your Kids About Jesus, which helps parents walk their children through the evidential foundations of Jesus’s life, ministry, death, and resurrection.
Blessings,
Christopher Reese
Managing Editor
An Interview with Natasha Crain
by Amy Davison
This quarantine has thrown parents everywhere for a loop. Work and school now take place around the kitchen table, show-and-tell requires an online meeting, and parents are once again the center of their child’s education.
As families adjust to this new normal, a book was just released that equips parents to make the most of this quarantine: Natasha Crain’s Talking With Your Kids about Jesus.
I can’t begin to tell you how practical Natasha’s book is. Our kids are having their faith challenged early (my son was 8 the first time he had to defend his faith!) and if we want them to stand firm, we have to begin their training young.
This is where Natasha’s book shines. As a mom suddenly turned full-time homeschooler, I loved that I could knock out a chapter while my guys ate breakfast. The discussion questions at the end of each chapter were also a huge blessing because they were tailored to kids of all stages while including further reading suggestions for kids (or parents) who are ready to dive deeper.
Each of the 30 conversations in TWKAJ help you explain the biggest challenges Christians face, from historical evidence for Jesus’s existence to understanding why His death matters, with truth and a whole heap of grace.
This incredible introduction not only helps our children get to know their Savior, but it provides a much-needed bridge to future apologetic shepherding.
I was fortunate enough to chat with Natasha and got a little insight into the book and Christian parenting.
Amy Davison: The release of TWKAJ was so perfectly timed with the Easter holiday. What led you to focus on Jesus for this next book project?
Natasha Crain: Talking with Your Kids about Jesus is my third book. The running theme throughout all of my books is that they address the faith conversations that are most important given the secular challenges kids will encounter today. Each book, however, has a different focus.
My first book, Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side, is an "apologetics 101" for Christian parents, covering a broad survey of subjects on God, Jesus, truth and worldviews, and the Bible.
My second book, Talking with Your Kids about God, covers 30 conversations specifically about God (e.g., evidence for God's existence, science and God, the nature of God, and the difference God makes).
My new book, Talking with Your Kids about Jesus, covers 30 conversations specifically about Jesus (e.g., the identity of Jesus, teachings of Jesus, death of Jesus, resurrection of Jesus, and the difference Jesus makes).
The second two books came about because many parents read Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side and wanted to then learn more in the same format (short, easy-to-understand chapters written in a parent-to-parent voice). It made sense to do one book focused on God-level questions and another on Jesus-level questions!
Davison: Sunday schools do a great job of encouraging kids to love Jesus, but sometimes fall short of helping them know Jesus. Why do you think it's so important for parents to make sure they understand who Jesus is?
Crain: This is a great and important distinction to make. If kids hear anything in Sunday school, VBS, and so on, it’s that Jesus loves them (and that they should love Jesus in return!). But you can only genuinely love someone to the extent you know them. Otherwise, the idea of loving Jesus becomes more about developing a certain affection in and of itself rather than about loving him in response to your knowledge ofhim.
This is one key area I hope my book will help parents in. The first section, on the identity of Jesus, focuses on the questions of who Jesus is and why we have good reason to believe it. The topics include:
Is Jesus a Myth?
Is Jesus the Jewish Messiah?
Is Jesus God?
Did Jesus Really Perform Miracles?
Did Ancient People Believe in Miracles Because They Were More Gullible?
How Can Jesus Be Both God and Human?
Part of knowing and loving Jesus is also understanding the beauty of what Jesus has done. It’s one thing for kids to know that Jesus is God, but another to know how he relates to us. Part 3 of the book focuses on explaining in depth the meaning of Jesus’s death on the cross—the ultimate demonstration of his love.
Davison: Scripture has this amazing way of jumping out at us as we study, with passages we've read a hundred times appearing like new. What jumped out at you as you were writing TWKAJ? Was there anything new that you learned or found fascinating about Jesus?
Crain: Absolutely! The writing process is often a learning process, either because you end up researching a subject more deeply than you already had or because you have a realization while trying to figure out how to best communicate concepts to others.
I’d say that I especially had some realizations while writing the chapter on how we know Jesus performed miracles. Having studied apologetics in depth for the last few years, I was well acquainted with the evidence for the resurrection, which I cover in part 4. But my chapter on Jesus’s miracles in general looked at evidence for the historicity of all the miracle claims. It considers facts such as Jesus’s miracles appearing in our earliest sources (we don’t see miracle claims grow over the time the New Testament was written), miracle working being such an integral part of Jesus’s ministry that if you try to extract miracles from the narrative much of what remains won’t even make sense, and the consensus among historians that Jesus attracted large crowds due to his works (“startling” works that his opponents didn’t even deny—they only questioned the source of his power). When I read Scripture now, the integral nature of the miracles in the narrative really leaps off the page!
Davison: Which topics/chapter questions did you find came up most often as you spoke with other parents?
Crain: I’d say that parents most often encounter the questions in Part 2, on the teachings of Jesus. In that section, I focus on six subjects that are often misunderstood by both skeptics and Christians, such as what Jesus taught about loving others, or about judging others, or about “organized religion.” These are the kinds of subjects that come up all the time in conversations on social media—“Hey, don’t call that a sin, you’re judging me!” We need to explicitly talk with our kids about these subjects so they don’t just absorb ideas from culture.
Davison: It always seems to happen that when we finish a project, that's when new ideas come to mind. As a mom yourself, what (if any) other tips would you give parents as they are reading TWKAJ and implementing these conversations with their kiddos?
Crain: I would point parents back to the introduction, in which I explain that having faith conversations doesn’t mean we have to set aside giant chunks of time to teach our kids these kinds of subjects. I give the analogy of ongoing “tidying” around the house—when we think of doing deep cleaning, we get overwhelmed, but when we change our mentality to one of consistent tidying, things start to look more manageable. In the same way, we should be tidying our kids understanding of their faith on an ongoing basis. It should become a way of life rather than an event!
—Amy Davison has an MA in Christian Apologetics from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. She writes and podcasts for Mama Bear Apologetics and her work has been published on The Stream and at the Evangelical Philosophical Society. She and her family currently reside near Dallas, TX.
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