How to Explain the Trinity to a Child By Sam Luce for Church Leaders
The biggest problem with how to explain the Trinity to a child is the fact that it is a mystery. We can never fully understand it but we can and should grow in our understanding of it. It’s something that is core to our faith and therefore should not be brushed aside.
The problem with explaining something so complex to kids is we look for a solid object to explain such abstract truths. The go-to objects for explaining the Trinity to kids are water, apples and eggs. How do I know this? Because I have been guilty of using them. When I address these misconceptions, it’s from a place of mutual understanding because I have used each of these in explaining this central doctrine to the Christian faith. I’ll try a blog post to be helpful to parents and kids workers alike. This post will by no means be comprehensive, but I hope that it is useful and accurate.
Why the Trinity matters. Some of you might be asking what the big deal is? Why make such a big deal of the Trinity? The reality is the Trinity is one of the core doctrines of our faith. It is complicated, so a visual illustration is helpful for kids. In the past, I have used illustrations that answer kids’ questions about the Trinity but do so at the expense of mystery and what is true. One of the more traditional ways people have used in the past (myself included) to describe the Trinity is an analogy of the states of water. Dr. Bruce Ware does an excellent job in his amazing book Big Truths for Young Hearts.
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Yet others have thought that H20 (water) shows us the Trinity since H20 can be three things: solid (ice), liquid (running water) and vapor (steam). But the same H20 molecules cannot be all three at exactly the same time. H20 is a good illustration of modalism (a false teaching of the Trinity that we’ll learn more about later) where God is first the Father, then the Son and then the Spirit, one at a time. But the Bible teaches that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit all at the same time. Each Person lives eternally as God.
