Teaching About the Trinity to Children

Here are some suggestions I’ve shared in a few places for how to teach the doctrine of the Trinity to children. Consider me an amateur as a teacher of young kids—I do serve a regular rotation with the first-to-fifth graders at my church, so I’m drawing from some experience, though not a deep well of it— but an expert on the doctrine side. These suggestions are especially designed to help with any complex doctrine, but I have in mind the Trinity above all.

Think About Delivery

Yes, bracket the subject matter for just a moment and consider how you’re presenting yourself as a communicator. Are you a friendly, trustworthy adult who looks like they enjoy talking to kids? Is the chance to talk about God and the Bible something that you delight in? Show it. When it comes to complex doctrines like the Trinity, it’s easy to wince, tense up, or project nervousness. Kids will register that wincing, and they may learn from it the wrong lesson-before-the-lesson: “This is tough stuff I wish I could avoid.” Take a moment to compose yourself, so the lesson-before-the-lesson is sincere love (1 Tim 1:5).

Basically, smile. I say this to myself above all, because I am just not a natural smiler. Project friendliness and enjoyment the best you can (within the limits of your own real personality).

Show How to Learn

Also, project humility and teachableness. Yes, you are speaking as some kind of authority figure, but when you’re handling a doctrine like this, you can show kids how you came to understand it. Here’s a simple technique to try: tell a little story about how you learned something about the Trinity. Even if all you’re reporting is that your pastor explained something to you once, you’re demonstrating that it’s possible to grow in understanding and appreciation of the truth. This also models the truth that a doctrine like the Trinity isn’t something you just “solve” and then have mastery over from now on, but is a reality that you keep growing into as you learn more and more about God.

Play the Long Game

This is probably not your only chance to communicate on this topic. In most settings (either with your own children or a group in a school or church) you’ll be teaching about this subject from various angles at different times. So banish the idea that you’ve got to say everything all at once, or say it all perfectly. If you can get one point across, do it; don’t get greedy and try to do too much all at once.

You know how it’s discouraging to consider that kids might not remember some of the best things you teach them? Yeah, it’s true. But the upside is, they might also forget some of your weakest lessons! So take the pressure off of yourself. A consistent series of helpful interactions is a better goal than that one shining moment of perfect teaching. Education of the young is day after day after day.

Memorization is Great

Kids learn formulas and key words easily, and the doctrine of the Trinity can be communicated in that form. In fact, the doctrine really benefits from being linked to a set of key phrases stored stably in the memory. “One God in three persons,” “three persons in one essence,” and of course above all “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” (Matt 28:19) are stock phrases that can be chanted, recited, repeated, and stored in the memory. Reciting words is not the same thing as understanding, of course. We want to go further than that. But since you can’t be with kids all the time or inside their minds as they are churning away and making sense of the world, give them the gift of sound words. Their minds are then appropriately stocked with things worth pondering when they get around to pondering.

Work Those Powers of Association

Okay, stay with me on this one. Down under the level of logical operations and verbal argumentation, there’s a cognitive region where we learn to group ideas together. We associate certain ideas with others. We don’t always remember how or when we learned to group these things together, but somehow our powers of association got trained and habituated. Teaching young children is a great chance to train those powers of association right the first time (re-training them in adults takes a lot more concerted effort). What I’m saying is, while we usually think of what a challenge or disadvantage it is to be teaching hard doctrines to young people, there is one way in which their youth is an advantage.

When it comes to the doctrine of the Trinity, everybody makes some sort of association. Sadly, some people hear “Trinity” and associate it with “logical puzzle / bad math.” They file it in the mental folder marked “puzzling but apparently necessary,” and from that point on they come to it with low expectations. It doesn’t matter how much good teaching they hear after that. The association is set, and all they are prepared to hear is some weak analogies that are temporarily interesting (“It’s like an egg, but not really”).

What should we help children associate the Trinity with? I’m glad you asked: The gospel.

Trinity and the Main Story of the Bible

The main story of the Bible is that the Father sent the Son, and the Father and the Son sent the Holy Spirit (John 3:16, John 15:26, Gal 4:4-6). And when that happened, we knew that God had always been the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Pedagogically, this means that you can teach the doctrine of the Trinity all the time without having to use the word “Trinity” or do the puzzling part. Every time you teach about Jesus and the Holy Spirit, you are implicitly teaching trinitarian theology. Occasionally—especially when it’s Trinity-lesson-time—you can add the conclusion, “and if God the Father sent the Son and the Holy Spirit, then God must always exist as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” And you can teach passages like John 3:16 as presupposing that truth about God: the kind of God who gives a Son must be the kind of God who has a Son.

Associating Trinity with the gospel story has innumerable advantages for future teaching. I can hardly restrain myself from rattling through them right now for my adult readers! I used to worry about how to be Trinity-centered without ceasing to be Jesus-centered; aren’t these in competition with each other? But then when I learned to wrap the Trinity doctrine around the Son who is sent by the Father and the Spirit who the Son sends, I learned that it all ties together: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God in one gospel.

Alert readers will note that in my last paragraph I modelled excitement, teachableness, the use of memorized formulas, the power of association, and the gospel story. And by concluding here I model a serene confidence that I will have further opportunities to teach more about this, later.

P.S. Here is a write-up of one way I taught the doctrine to actual real live kids a couple of years ago. I rarely do the same lesson twice, and I think of this one as my “go ahead and do some analogies” lesson, which means I didn’t focus it on the Father-sent-the-Son dynamic.