This week I read an article in the British newspaper, The Telegraph, by the paper’s religious affairs editor, John Bingham. The Anglican Church is currently introducing a program that’s likened to Sunday School for adults, designed to teach people the most basic texts of the Bible—the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Beatitudes. The aim is to re-teach these basic Christian tenets to a nation that has almost completely forgotten them. One of the authors of this “Pilgrim Course” is the Right Reverend Steven Croft, Bishop of Sheffield, who told the Telegraph:
“It is very striking. My parents’ generation all knew the Lord’s Prayer by heart, my generation not so much and my children’s generation not so much at all. It is the same asking people to recite the 10 Commandments which at one time every person growing up in Britain would have been able to recite. People are losing their memory of these things.”
The Bishop of Stockport, the Right Reverend Robert Atwell, said that widespread ignorance of once familiar texts had deprived a generation of people of a source of strength to help them cope at times of trauma. “We are losing our capacity to lament as a nation because we don’t have the spiritual resources, we don’t have the language, we are groping around because we have not got this fundamental insight,” he said.
My question to you: Do your children know the Lord’s Prayer by heart? Psalm 23? What about the Beatitudes? Our kids can learn large amounts of Scripture by memory. And we ourselves can continue learning and memorizing God’s Word. I’m presently working on Romans 16:25-27. It’s only three verses, but it’s three very long verses, one of the lengthiest doxologies in the Bible, but worth every word. What passage is your family working on?
To read the article in the Telegraph, click here.