Trey Kullman joins Erica for a conversation on family discipleship. He and a couple buddies have written a book that combines Bible time with video games and was created to help parents engage their children in faith-based conversations. This is a great option to stay engaged spiritually with your kids, and encourages your kids to grow the habit of being connected in the Word.
Guest: Trey Kullman, one of the dads, Co-Author of Faith Builder Catechism: Devotions To Level Up Your Family Discipleship!
Catch hope & encouragement with Erica on weekday mornings from 5:00 AM – 10:00 AM, and Sundays from 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Erica:
What do you get when you combine Bible time with playing video games, a way to connect your kids with God? Hey, it’s Spirit 1053. I’m Erica with Trey Coleman, one of the three dads who wrote the book, Faith Builder Catechism: Devotions To Level Up Your Family Discipleship. This is awesome. Hey, Trey, welcome to the show.
Trey:
Hey, Erica, how are you?
Erica:
Well, I’m looking forward to our chat, but I got to start with your Instagram. I was on there doing my homework learning about you, and I saw that you and your wife visited Washington over the summer, but you got smoked out by the wildfires.
Trey:
We did. We saw half of it. So, we went to Mount Rainier. It was still pretty smoky, but we checked it out nonetheless. Hiked up, definitely not to the summit, but to base camp. But then my wife, who’s like the travel ninja basically, so she called an audible and we ended up going down to Oregon, and so we explored the Oregon coast and it was beautiful too. And then finally saw a smoke-free Mount Rainier flying back home. That was the best view we got was on the plane heading away from Seattle, but it was still great.
Erica:
How ironic. Yeah, the Pacific Northwest is just absolutely beautiful. It’s rugged. It changes every day, which is what I love about it.
Trey:
Man. Yeah, it was great. We loved it. I had 10 out of 10 would recommend. Yeah, we stayed in Canon Beach. Portland was great. Seattle was awesome. We’ve got some friends who’ve planted churches and who were serving in churches up that way as well. But I never actually made my way to Washington, so it was really fun. It was a treat. We’d love to go back at some point.
Erica:
Yeah, come on back. We have so much to see and experience. Well, Trey, I think it’s so cool that you and two other dads wrote this book. How did it come about?
Trey:
Yeah, so Jared and Kevin and I started working on podcasts. Just the three of us are friends. We wanted to work on something together. Jared and I both served as family pastors. Kevin is a student minister now, and one of the questions we got asked all the time as family pastors, kids pastors, was, Hey, we didn’t grow up in the church, or our parents were not at kind of teaching us these things. What can we do to plug in and engage with our kids to teach them about the faith? And then Jared came in one night as we were recording, he’s like, Hey, I pitched this idea to new growth from our podcast to see if they’d be interested in making a book out of it. And we’re like, oh, that’s cool. And he’s like, they said yes. We’re like, oh, that’s great. And he’s like, and it’s due in about a year, so we got to start writing.
Erica:
What a fun shock. Oh my goodness. Now, are you and the other dad’s video gamers? Are you guys fans of playing?
Trey:
We are, yeah. Some of us more than others. Jared, I would say, is probably the least. His kids are the oldest, and so he’s got his hands full chasing down college football games and different things like that with his kid. Our boys two, I have daughter who’s 12 who could take or leave all video games, but our two boys are super into it. And so, it may not be the thing that I love to do, but if you love doing it, I’m happy to spend time plugging into it with you. But then, yeah, it’s a good way for me to kind of relax and kind, I don’t know, take the edge off after along the parenting or chasing kids around a baseball field or writing or editing, or my knees aren’t what they used to be, at age 40, so I’ve got to play basketball digitally now.
Erica:
That’s so funny. And I think it’s similar to when you’re in the car with your kids sometimes, that’s the best place to a conversation, both looking ahead.
Trey:
Absolutely.
Erica:
You’re looking at something else and it takes the awkwardness out of things sometimes, so that’s pretty cool.
Trey:
Yeah, yeah, we love it. We love it.
Erica:
So one of the things I really appreciate about your book is that you guys have included memory verses. You are a children’s pastor. So, what is the value in memorizing scripture from your point of view?
Trey:
Yeah, I mean, for our kids, you just think about it. Again, every family’s a little different. Our kids are public school kids, and so we kind of drop them off in the morning earlier than I would like, but it is what it is. We’re up real early, but they’re gone for six, eight hours at a time at school. And so, this gives them kind of a chance as they’re memorizing scripture, and even life for a third grader, there are good days, there’s a lot of good days, but there’s hard days. Stuff pops up, a friend disappoints ’em, or they don’t do as long a test as they would hope, or they don’t get picked for a team at the playground game, or whatever it is. Just to have that kind of content there in their head, something they can turn to and remind themselves of who God is, or who they are in Christ, or just to be encouraged by a piece of scripture, something that’s really easy for them to hang onto, memorize and rehearse through their day, whether it’s a good thing or a bad day. They’ve kind of got that built into their minds and their hearts, and they can reflect on it without having to pull out a Bible or pull out an index card. Again, here’s plenty of space for that too, but just having some verses that they can go back to get them through those really times of joy, times of sadness, times of excitement, times of frustration, all those different things. So, we find it be a good tool just like us as adults, right?
Erica:
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. There have been times I’m like, oh, thank you Lord for that verse. I was in the ER recently, I’m totally fine. I thought I was going to need my appendix out. But it’s funny how a Psalm will just rise up in your heart and you’re like, thank you, Lord. You’re there.
Trey:
Yeah, yeah. In the big moments, little moments, you’re sitting in traffic, carpool goes sideways, whatever it might be, it’s nice to have kind of that piece of God’s Word there to just encourage you to calm you down, to chill you out, to remind you of the perspective on things.
Erica:
Absolutely. So Trey, you are a pastor, you’re a father, you’re a husband. You understand how busy life can get. And so, I love this idea of pressing pause on screen time. What does that look like in your house? How do you guys hang out? How do you live out your faith at home?
Trey:
So a lot of it is, we’re kind of adjusting to a lot of that now as our kids have gotten older. Our youngest is now six, our oldest is 12. And so, this season in particular, it’s been kind of a whirlwind. We’ve got a kid in middle school now, two in elementary school, and they start at different times. And in the different times, everyone’s playing a sport. And so, we’re trying to navigate, alright, we’re out of the house an awful lot, so what does it look like to even just make space after I pick them up or once they get home to press into the Bible? Because we may not have time at bedtime because a baseball game runs over or whatever, and all of a sudden you’re getting home at nine o’clock and they need a shower because they stink, they’re covered in dirt or whatever.
And so, just finding little ways, whether it’s in the car, to just highlight something. Ask them about their day, and kind of connect that via that conversation or grab something earlier. Again, bedtime used to be a really great easy win for us to just sit down, Hey, we’re all going to read the Bible together for five minutes. We’ll pray. Then we’ll kind of start our bedtime routine. We’re finding it’s more and more difficult as our kids are getting older. So trying to find ways to kind of navigate that even now. So 2:30, our two boys are home. First thing we will just grab a book off the shelf oftentimes and say, Hey, let’s press into this for five minutes. You guys can kind of work on homework and stuff after that, but I know if we don’t do it then, then it’s homework. Then they want to go play, or then they want to get a tablet out or then it’s time for dinner or laundry or whatever else is going on that day. And so, trying to move that up, the priority list a little bit, even in the schedule has been helpful for us in this season as things tend to, for us at least, to intensify as the night goes on.
Erica:
Intensify…
Trey:
People get more tired and people get more on edge a little bit, sometimes.
Erica:
I get you. And you’ve provided this wonderful resource. I mean, I’m looking at this book, it’s really a beautiful book, and every devotional is two pages and there’s color and some of the fonts are bigger, and it’s just doable. So, what I want to ask you, Trey, for a parent who’s listening right now and they’re like, you know what, I’ve never done a devotional with my family. Do we have to all sit at the dining room table and dress up? How would you describe what a traditional devotional looks like?
Trey:
Well, I can’t speak to traditional devotional, but this one I would say, and again, we kind of designed it this way, it’s easy to navigate. Like you said, you open a book, it’s a page on either side, and that’s it. That’s all you’re responsible for. So, as a parent, you don’t need a bible degree, you don’t need a craft closet with sock puppets or felt boards, or anything like that. You need this book and it’s laid out pretty straightforward. There’s kind of an icebreaker question. There’s a catechism question, there’s a memory verse, there’s a scripture to read, and then there’s a brief devotion and then a prayer prompt. And it’s all stuff you can knock out. You can do it in a car. If you show up early to a baseball game, you can do it while you’re waiting in line at Chick-fil-A. You can do it kind of wherever you might find yourself to have five or 10 minutes to redo. Maybe it is a dinner table. That’s great. We have not sat down for dinner together as a family the last three days. So, if we were waiting on that to happen, it wouldn’t happen. But there’s plenty of space grab, pull up some couch, do it with one, do it with all three. There’s lots of flexibility and freedom, which is one of the things I like about this.
And then two, I don’t know if you saw it, there’s little maps kind of between the sections. And so as you go through, your kid gets to pop a sticker on that map, kind of like a Super Mario Brothers level to say, Hey, we did this one, we knocked it out. We feel comfortable of knowing this bit of the truth. We’re going to slap a sticker on that and we can move on to the next level., which is really fun for kids to kind of gamify a little bit their progress as they’re working through the book, which is really fun.
Erica:
I love it.
Trey:
But yeah, doesn’t take a ton of time. Doesn’t take a ton of prep. It’s just pick it up, read through it together. Hopefully you’re able to engage your kids in some conversations. So again, we’re writing, we are used to the “Yeah, that’s fine. It’s good. It was bad. I don’t remember what ate for lunch.” So we’ve tried our best to provide some conversation points so that you can avoid most of those answers and maybe get to that next level depth and conversation
Erica:
A little bit. Oh, Trey Kullman, he’s a dad, a children’s pastor, a husband. He gets it. Thank you for writing this incredible book, Faith Builder Catechism. I hope you’ll come back.
Trey:
Yeah, thanks so much for having us on. Yes, it’s really exciting. Thanks a lot, Erica.
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