Are you using, or considering using, Bible Bucks or a similar reward-based system? Are you a concerned parent or volunteer?
This is for you.
In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis points to a robust way of motivating behavior through what he called the Chest. Lewis identified the Chest as the “liaison” between the mind and appetite, saying that “emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments” dwell in the Chest.[2] Organized emotions–including a love for the moral law for its own sake–possess the ability to motivate a child into and through adulthood.
However, the culture has neglected the Chest for so long that even well-meaning children’s ministry leaders do not recognize that offering material rewards for Christlike behavior undermines the development of the Chest and thus the Christian.
Through Bible Bucks[1] and similar reward-based systems, well-meaning churches use greed to motivate children to exhibit Christlike behavior. However, greed motivates only so long as the material rewards continue to flow–and they will not always flow.
But we need to start from the beginning.
The Indispensable Chest
A fully developed Chest houses deep loves for rational ideals that can motivate a young Christian through the trials of life. Emotion and reason meet and operate in concert toward ideals in the Chest. Lewis writes, “The Chest–Magnanimity–Sentiment–these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.”[3]
In practice, possessing a developed Chest means to love what is objectively good, great, beautiful, and moral not because such things are a means to an end but because they are rationally worthy of love. The Chest is a powerful engine of steadfast motivation. According to Lewis, a veteran of WWI himself, when the bullets begin to fly, “the crudest sentimentalism … about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use” than logical arguments.[4]
In the context of children’s ministry, even an elementary love for the Word of God is of more use in the face of tribulations than the stony memorization of a hundred verses. Even a poorly developed Chest will provide a surer motivation than mere emotion or reason alone and thus can help keep the young believer from wandering from the faith.
What Does the Child Truly Love?
Yet within many children’s ministries, Bible Bucks and similar reward-based systems motivate external behaviors without regard for internal sentiments. To be sure, the broader instruction may address the internal motivation, but the Bible Bucks system rewards the external behavior regardless of the internal motivation.
The website Kids Sunday School Place offers free Bible Bucks templates and a representative description of their alleged value: “Bible Bucks are a great way to reward kids for good behavior, completing memory work, bringing their Bibles to Sunday school or even inviting their friends to church.”[5] Children earn Bible Bucks and can spend them on toys, candy, art supplies, and other rewards. This system incentivizes children to not only behave but actively do good works.
However, in memorizing Scripture, does the child love the Word of God or the gel pen set? If the child loves the gel pen set, then memorizing Scripture is a cold means to a material end. The earthly and immediate reward subverts the heavenly meaning. If the child loves the Word of God, then the gel pen set is superfluous.
In both cases, the child receives the same reward. Whether the child cares about introducing her friend to Jesus or covets candy, the child who brings a friend to church is handed a stack of Bible Bucks like so many pieces of silver.
A Dictatorship of Greed
Moreover, the Bible Bucks system appeals to greed to encourage virtuous behaviors, undermining the virtues themselves. The explicit motivation is not to share the good news of eternal life with a friend or to memorize Scripture as a guide for one’s life and walk. It is not even the lesser, but still positive, motivation to please or obey authority figures.
No, the Bible Bucks system appeals not to the mind or the Chest but to the appetite for candy and toys.
Lewis says that a person is “by his appetite mere animal.”[6] Dogs also learn to sit still and do tricks in exchange for treats. However, children are not animals, and unlike dogs, they can commit the sin of greed.
In Mere Christianity, Lewis says that “pride can often be used to beat down the simpler vices.”[7] Lewis says that it pleases Satan when pride motivates a person to avoid evil–such as promiscuousness–since the external behavior belies the underlying “Dictatorship of Pride.”[8]
Virtuous behavior motivated by sinful appetite is not virtuous at all.
In the case of Bible Bucks, a child’s virtuous behaviors do little good if the Dictatorship of Greed is being built brick by brick in the child’s heart. After all, if a stronghold of greed guards and motivates the child’s Christlike behavior, then there is less room for the orderly feelings of the Chest–much less genuine spiritual growth.
The Tragi-Comedy of the Internal Machine
This reliance on greed means reward systems like Bible Bucks incentivize behaviors in a way that has little effectiveness as the child enters adolescence and adulthood. Lewis calls the lack of the Chest a “tragi-comedy” because “we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible.”[9]
Churches view the departure of young people with dismay, but motivating Christian behavior via rewards unwittingly teaches the churched young person to follow after materialism rather than sacrificially love God.
When the material rewards stop flowing–and they will–what is left to motivate the child, adolescent, or adult? If Bible Bucks motivated their Christian behavior, not much at all.
Lewis writes: “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.”[10]
Bible Bucks build individuals swayed by material rewards instead of developing “stable sentiments”[11] toward truth and morality, and yet the same children’s ministry leaders who use Bible Bucks expect a lasting, loving commitment to God. As a result, many children grow up and out of the church because their Christian behavior had a foundation of sand.
The Shocking Alternative
Contrast this shallowness with the immeasurable and emotionally compelling rewards of God’s promise for which one must rationally delay gratification. This is the Chest at work.
Lewis writes that emotions “can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.”[12]
The hearts of children must be taught to obey their heads in loving truth rather than crave baubles bought with Bible Bucks. The head-ruled Christian recognizes that this world and all its achievements are doomed to destruction like a train speeding toward a broken bridge. The rational Christian also knows eternal life awaits those who trust in Jesus.
Lewis says the core of Christianity is this: “Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying, He disabled death itself.”12
Christians do not earn eternal Bible Bucks to get into heaven but accept an unmerited gift bought by Christ’s blood. This rational Christian outlook on life addresses emotional desires for glory, security, community, and everlasting life. For the Christian of any age, the emotional yearning for the ultimate, unmerited reward is rational and lifelong, if not always immediately satisfying.
Not Like Raising Turkeys
Therefore, in order to motivate lasting behavior, children’s ministry leaders should teach children to love truth, goodness, and Christianity as lovely in themselves. This cuts even deeper than the “crudest sentimentalism”[13] that can keep a soldier steadfast under enemy fire. Lewis says that “a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment.”[14]
In other words, a feeling for truth motivates the behavior of pursuing truth. In more narrow way, a feeling for the rationally grounded Gospel can also motivate external Christian behavior. Dr. Holly Ordway says in Apologetics and the Christian Imagination that a problem within the church is that “the Gospel call is heard only in the mind, or only in the emotions, but not in the whole self.”[15]
Children’s ministry leaders should engage the minds and emotions of children to help them find meaning in the Gospel with their whole selves, with their Chests. As with feelings toward flags or nations, feelings toward truth and goodness have the capacity to motivate lasting behavior. In other words, children’s ministry leaders must strive to systematically elevate the children in their charge–intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.
Lewis provides a helpful illustration. In contrasting, old and new methods of education, he uses the analogy of old birds teaching young birds to take flight compared to “poultry-keepers” who grow young birds “for purposes of which the birds know nothing.”[16]
Instead of acting like a turkey farmer and herding children via Bible Bucks, the instructor should be humble enough to understand that he passes on what others (hopefully) passed to him like a torch in the night: An abiding faith in the living Savior of the world.
[1] Also known by other names such as Jesus Bucks, Miracle Bucks, and other usually faith-based names.
[2] C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1978), 34.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] “Bible Bucks,” Kids Sunday School Place, accessed September 22, 2020, https://www.kidssundayschool.com/teaching-aids/participation/bible-bucks.
[6] Lewis, Abolition, 34.
[7] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, (New York: Macmillan, 1986),97.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Lewis, Abolition, 35.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid., 34.
[12] Ibid., 30.
[13] Ibid., 34.
[14] Ibid., 35.
[15] Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith, (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Road, 2017),22, Google Books.
[16] Lewis, Abolition, 32-33.
