Taking My Kid To Church: "We are so happy to know Jesus, we want to share that with other people!"

A group of kids in Sunday School, near a poster that says "God is love." Image source.

"Taking My Kid To Church" is a blog series about how I plan to handle my child's contact with church/ Christian culture.

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So what if my kid goes to a Sunday School class, and the lesson is about evangelism, and the teachers say, "We are just so happy about knowing Jesus, we can't help telling people about him! When you're really excited about something, it makes you want to tell people, right? Well that's how we feel about Jesus!"

As an ex-evangelical, I cringe so hard at this. But, hang on a second, if we just take it at face value, there's not actually anything wrong with that statement. Yes, certainly, it is possible that someone might be very excited about believing in Jesus, and therefore they want to tell people about him. Sure, of course that could happen, and it's totally reasonable and fine.

And furthermore, we might acknowledge several different possibilities concerning one's beliefs about Jesus and emotional response:

1. You are very happy about believing in Jesus, and so you just want to tell everyone.
2. You are very happy about believing in Jesus, but you don't necessarily want to tell everyone. Maybe because you're shy, or because it seems too personal to talk about, or because you know your friends have different beliefs and you don't want to come across as disrespecting their beliefs.
3. You believe in Jesus but aren't sure if it makes you happy or not. It's not exactly clear that it's a good thing you'd want to recommend to your friends.
4. You don't believe in Jesus.

(And there are other possible combinations of beliefs and emotions too! I'm just listing these here because they're the ones that came to mind for me.)

Any of these options are totally fine! It's totally understandable that someone might have those beliefs and that emotional response. Great!

So yes, taking the hypothetical Sunday School teacher's statement at face value, there's nothing wrong with it. Indeed, it is certainly possible that someone is excited about Jesus and therefore wants to talk to everyone about him, and that's fine. Sure.

Here's the thing, though. I grew up in the church, and I know that when people say things like that, what they actually mean is "Christians are supposed to do evangelism, and here's one way to guilt them into doing it. You're supposed to love Jesus so much you just can't help talking about him. And if that's not the case, well you're not a good Christian, and you should feel bad."

It's about policing people's emotions. If you internalize this teaching, you can't be honest with yourself about what you actually feel. You can't know yourself and identify your emotions/desires/motivations and handle them in a healthy way. The most you can do is "I feel like... I'm ... not ... excited about knowing Jesus OH NO REPENT REPENT REPENT God help me oh the depths of my sin, how could I be so ungrateful after everything that Jesus has done for me, ah truly the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked."

Whereas I now believe a healthy way to handle one's emotions would look more like this: "I feel like... I'm ... not ... excited about knowing Jesus. Hmm okay, why would that be? Perhaps because I feel like XYZ? But why do I feel XYZ? Hmm, maybe because A is important to me and B is not... well is A actually important to me, or do I just do it because it's easy but it's really not what I want to be doing in the long term..." and so on. The feeling itself- "I'm not excited about knowing Jesus" - is not a good or bad thing. Now, it may be the case that you wish you felt differently, and so it might be helpful if you explored your reasons for feeling that way (maybe related to your own desires and priorities) and evaluate if they make sense or not.

I want to teach Square Root that whatever feelings you feel are okay. Now that doesn't mean if you feel like you want to do something, it's okay to do it. No. We have to manage our emotions and handle them in a healthy way. For example, feeling mad about something is fine, but it's not healthy to keep thinking about it all day and making yourself feel more and more mad- probably it's better to focus on something else that's more positive.

And feeling driven to tell people about Jesus because you love him so much is fine, but it's also fine if you don't feel that way. And if that's the Sunday School lesson Square Root hears (whether or not that's what the teachers intended...) then there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But I'm going to make it very clear to him that if anybody says you "should" feel some certain way, and they try to make you feel bad for not having certain emotions, well they're wrong. And if I give him that as a foundation, he might not hear the "you should feel bad if you're not excited about knowing Jesus" message in church. Or if he does hear it, he'll know it's obviously not true.

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Related:
Christians Are Supposed To Feel Bad Over Not Reading the Bible Enough (and Here Are the Receipts)