Book Review: Lord Teach Me to Pray for Kids

Title: Lord Teach Me to Pray for Kids

Author: Kay Arthur and Janna Arndt

Publisher: Harvest House

Date: 2002

ISBN: 0-7369-0666-5

Length: 176 pages

Illustrations: line drawings by Steve Bjorkman

Quote: “Welcome to Camp MacHaven, the training facility for God’s Special Forces.”

Kay Arthur wrote a Bible study for adults called Lord Teach Me to Pray in 28 Days. Janna Arndt revised and abridged it for middle school readers. Her revision features a lot more silliness about the hypothetical boot camp for future “prayer warriors,” and it’s printed in a school workbook format, but it still contains plenty of Bible references and instructions on studying the Bible’s teachings.

Topics discussed include what it means to pray “with faith,” the hazards of expecting that Christians can “just name it and claim it” while praying for personal benefit, the concept of trying to know and fulfill God’s Will, the Lord’s Prayer, praying for forgiveness, praying for protection from temptation, praising God, avoiding “vain repetition,” and more.

Bonus features include several puzzles, “sound off” chants, and an explanation of Morse code.

Vacation Bible School and Sunday School teachers who feel up to the challenge of telling half-grown wigglers to sit down, read, write, and learn things, will be able to use this book to good purposes. Scattered throughout, at the beginnings and ends of sections, are hints about providing physical drill, hydration, and Meals Ready to Eat for ten-year-old “soldiers.”

When considering Vacation Bible School I’m tempted to pad out this review with a reminiscence of the summer I “taught Vacation Bible School.”

I was fifteen years old.

I had never attended a V.B.S. sponsored by any church, anywhere.

I had no idea whatsoever about what I was expected to do.

That made me a little bit less prepared than many of the parents who volunteer to teach V.B.S. at their church…but not a lot.

And it turned out that what I was expected to do was very similar to what the teachers are expected to do for parents who sit down and plan, “Now there’s a Baptist V.B.S. for the first week of June, there’s one at the Church of Christ for the middle two weeks, one at the Methodist church in the fourth week, and one at the Adventist church in July…”—In other words, V.B.S. teachers are typically handed a few Sunday School books and some junk the children might use as craft materials, and expected to baby-sit the rug rats whose parents don’t want to pay to send them to summer camp.

Some factors that made my “teaching” experience a little less embarrassing were that the children were relatives whose parents were gathering to rebuild a house that summer, they all liked each other and looked forward to spending time together, the ones who spent the most time in our little home-based Vacation Bible School were the ones I’d been baby-sitting all winter, and they had all gone to an “official” V.B.S. sponsored by some church or other and had some idea what they were supposed to be doing. They were nice Christian children, on the whole. (Later in life I tried teaching a Sunday School group of middle-schoolers who had heard it all before and who always wanted to skip the lesson and just order pizza.)

We all liked singing Christian songs together; those of us who had some musical ability were accustomed to putting up with the voices of those who had none. We all were familiar with Bible stories and could draw or enact scenes that everyone recognized right away. That took up about an hour while the morning dew dried off the grass, after which we could reach a consensus about whether the weather was more favorable to Wholesome Socializing or Getting Out In God’s Creation. In other words, it was baby-sitting.

That is what some Vacation Bible Schools accomplish and there’s nothing much wrong with it, but a good teacher can actually use V.B.S. to teach children something about the Bible, along with the physical activities, refreshments, and music.

The funny part about my V.B.S. experience was that, after the summer when I’d read The Living Bible at thirteen and the summer when I’d read the Psalms, the Prophets, and the Epistles as well as the stories at fourteen, this was the summer when I was reading the entire Bible. Aloud. To my siblings—at least two children, separated by five years in physical age and at least ten years in mental age. From some Mennonite friends our parents had bought a Spanish Bible, and I was earning it by translating it aloud into English by way of a bedtime story for the siblings, while Mother followed along in the English Bible and supplied words I didn’t know. (We skipped the most violent sections and the dullest ones, but we read the entire book of Job.) It was a good way to learn more Spanish words and more about the Bible. I think, by age seven, even my baby sister was getting something out of our explorations of the non-narrative parts of the Bible.

So why did I not even try taking that Spanish Bible to the home where we met for V.B.S., letting one of the older children follow along in one of the English Bibles there, and astonishing the cousins as well as the siblings with the fact that it’s possible to read words printed in one language while translating them into another language? No idea. Well, nobody told me that getting the kids to think about anything in the Psalms or the Epistles would have been a valid goal for a Vacation Bible School.

You, Gentle Reader, now have this information. A Vacation Bible School teaches children who are old enough to read something about the Bible, and if you and your students can endure the corny “soldier” motif in this book, you can use it for that purpose. They will learn about prayer, about the Gospel According to St John, and they might even choose to learn the Morse code.