The Barefoot Evangelist

Over the years as a pastor, preacher, and children’s Christian educator, I have fielded questions from just about everyone.

Women wanting to understand their place in the early church. Teenagers hungry for a faith that shows up in the streets as much as in the sanctuary. Seniors standing at the edge of life, wondering what those final moments might hold. Men who would like very much to debate anything that doesn’t leave them comfortably in charge.

Most of this I can take in stride. Sometimes with deep thought. Sometimes with deep sarcasm. Usually with something that passes for a reasonably pastor-like answer.

But nothing unnerves me quite like a thoughtful child with a genuine question about God.

They rarely realize what they are asking. They ask the kinds of questions theologians have been circling for centuries. Questions that sound painfully simple from their perspective and completely disarming from ours.

Which may be why so many of us remember being told, as children, to “just believe.” Or worse, being gently (or not so gently) laughed at for asking in the first place. The idea that faith means never having questions often starts very young — not because children stop wondering, but because adults get uncomfortable and shut the wondering down.

The other reason these questions are so beautifully terrifying is that children don’t yet have the life experience to wander off into abstractions and tangents. They are concrete. Direct. Unfiltered.

If we are going to talk about whether God has a belly button, we first have to talk about what a belly button is and why we have one. Suddenly a theological curiosity becomes a biology lesson and an unexpected conversation about how humans come to be.

Children are natural theologians.

For them, the world is fluid, immediate, and deeply moral. Their sense of right and wrong hasn’t been worn thin by decades of explaining why the bad guy often wins. Justice, to a child, is obvious. Fairness is obvious. Kindness is obvious. And they have an almost laser-sharp ability to cut through all our carefully constructed adult noise and put their finger directly on the point.

Our instinct, when faced with something that makes us feel out of our depth, is often to dismiss it. To redirect. To answer quickly and move on.

What if, instead, we turned the question back?

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

That simple response often reveals what they are really asking. It gives us context. And more often than not, it opens up possibilities that stretch our own understanding far beyond the tidy answers we were preparing to give.

We do not need to be the adult with all the answers.

We can be the adult willing to sit beside a child and try to make sense of a world that feels a little too big for both of us.

Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me.”

I like to imagine that while they were sitting on his lap and sprawled at his feet, they were asking him all sorts of inconvenient, wonderful, curious questions about God — and that he was delighted to answer them.