Is a Children’s Picture Bible Really a Bible?

A couple of years ago as I was reading a popular religion/faith blog I came across comments from several parents who were so frustrated with their church or THE church that they had decided to take a break from church for a while and were using The Jesus Storybook Bible as a substitute for Sunday School. 

The full title of this children’s Bible is The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name. The “his” in the title refers to Jesus, and for each story, especially those from the Old Testament, there is a paragraph on how this story relates to Jesus Christ. I purchased it recently and found reading it a little like sitting through an extended children’s sermon where the children think the answer to every question asked is Jesus.

While there are many favorable reviews on Amazon for this children’s Bible, there are plenty of scathing reviews that mostly boil down to “this is not a Bible.” 

I totally agree. It is not a Bible. It is a children’s picture Bible. 

Iconic Stories of the Gospels: 5 (out of 100) Things Your Child Should Know Before Confirmation Class

Samaritan Woman at the Well - He Qi

When I was just past Confirmation “age,” I attended a large national youth convention. It was memorable for me for two reasons. One, because, though I didn’t recognize it at the time, it was when I first sensed a call to ministry in the church. Two, because, even more importantly, it was the first time a story from the Bible really came alive for me and significantly impacted my faith. 

In all of the posts in this series, I hope that I have been able to convey the ability of a fruitful confirmation experience to help students experience the Bible and the church in a new way not just for that one year, but for the rest of their lives. Yes, as children and younger youth, we teach them the stories and we help build on their own personal experience of the church, but in Confirmation they are able to ask questions of the Bible, apply the Bible to their own experience, and even gain an appreciation for the beauty that is in scripture and be moved by it. 

All five of these iconic stories from the Gospels are moving and meaningful in their own way, and in Confirmation class we can dig deeper into them to reveal a beauty that goes beyond a Sunday school version of the story. 

It was the story of the Samaritan woman, or “the woman at the well” (#67 in this list) that I experienced and understood in a radically new way at that conference. The story was told through liturgical dance (something that if done well can be very moving), and I for the first time could see myself in the scripture as though it was me who was experiencing this good news of Christ’s living water. 

12 Developmental Steps for Children & Youth in the Life of a Congregation

I usually write about the things that our children and youth should know and how we can teach it to them at home and at church. But I have been thinking more recently about all of the things that we need to teach our children to be able to do as they grow in maturity as a member of a community of faith. 

So I thought through the ways that children develop in their capabilities as members of the community and came up with twelve markers (based on age and area of competency) to help us all think about how we are nurturing and encouraging children in their role as members of the church. 

This is not intended as a critique of children who have not yet taken these steps, but as an aid to examining how we share our expectations with children and youth and the opportunities we give them to meet or exceed those expectations.

In my experience, children and youth are ready for many of these things much earlier than we would think. They are simply waiting to be asked to rise to the occasion. 

The World Religions: 5 (out of 100) Things Your Child Should Know Before Confirmation Class

I have written a few times before about being part of a family that is “inter-religious.” You can find these posts here, here, and here. Obviously, we are motivated to talk in our home about what it means to be a part of a religion that is not Christian. 

prayer beads from my brother

Of all the conversations that we have together with our son, these are the ones that seem to repeat most often. For example, no matter how many times we explain what it means to be Jewish, he will ask the same question again a month or so later.

Interestingly, he hardly ever asks about being a Buddhist. He only knows one, and I think he just trusts that his uncle knows what he is doing, so he doesn’t worry about it. 

When I work with students in a middle school, high school or Confirmation class, I instinctively want to teach them to respect and even appreciate other faith traditions. And yet, most youth these days have a decidedly post-modern perspective on the world, which means that they are already comfortable with differences and differences of opinion. They don’t usually need me to teach them respect...they need to hear from me why is I have chosen and why they may choose to be a Christian in the midst of a diverse religious landscape. 

The Last Temptation of Christ or Why Church is Sometimes All Joy and No Fun

Every first week of Lent, as we hear the story of Jesus’ temptation for 40 days in the wilderness, I can’t help but recall the way that Martin Scorsese depicted this scene in his controversial interpretation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel The Last Temptation of Christ.

As Jesus prepares himself for this time of trial, he draws a circle in the sand out of which he will not move. Scorsese films it from above, and from the arial vantage point we can see that it is not just any circle but rather a perfect circle which could never be drawn by a human hand, only by the divine. That always impressed teenagers when I showed the scene in class.

The controversy surrounding the film, of course, was not the depiction of Jesus’ temptation in the desert but rather a final temptation offered to him as he hangs on the cross. I remember as a child hearing adults around me talk about the movie and the people who were planning to protest showings of it around the country. Many too easily criticized the film because it it shows Jesus having intimate relations with a woman (or rather, a few women). Sex, then, is what we think the film is about--this is the “last temptation” that Jesus has to face. 

Kazantzakis’s book, though, is not really about sex at all. He uses the story of Jesus of Nazareth to explore the theme of the flesh verses the spirit. His Jesus wrestles with this nagging sense of divinity that is growing within him, with the pain that will come with submitting to its call, and with the apartness that it makes him feel from his fellow human beings. 

When Jesus succumbs to this last temptation, it is about being normal again, about having a family, about lifting the burden of so many expectations from his shoulders. 

To be honest, the movie ruined Willem Dafoe for me forever. His Jesus is just so angst-ridden, so troubled by his inner struggle, so frustrated by the misunderstandings of those around him. Dafoe’s (Scorsese’s/Kazantzakis’) Jesus may find divine joy in life, but he is not having any human fun in the living. This is his final temptation. 

The Miracles of Jesus: 5 (out of 100) Things Your Child Should Know BEFORE Confirmation.

The other day, while walking home from church, my son asked me if I ever wonder whether or not the things in the Bible actually happened. 

He said, “...like the story of the bush that was on fire and didn’t burn. That just can’t happen.” 

I told him that yes, there are some things in the Bible that are hard to explain and hard to understand AND which seem impossible to us. But the Bible is not just a story of what is possible for us, but there are also parts that tell us about things that are only possible for God to do. 

He wasn’t all that satisfied with this response...so I tried again.

I told him that I can’t really understand everything that happened in the Bible, but what I know is true and I know is real is that these stories were important to the people who came before us. They told these stories to teach each other about God, and this means that we continue to teach them and hear them, and they should still be important for us today. 

This, for some reason, made him feel much better. He could understand the real people who told these miraculous stories even when the miracles themselves were too hard to understand. 

Often when we teach the stories of the miraculous works of Jesus Christ from the gospels, both teachers and students get caught up in the plausibility or the probability of each one. We try to figure out how you fillet a fish into that many parts rather than trying to find the meaning behind a story of abundance. 

Confirmation is the perfect time to really wrestle with the miraculous moments in scripture - especially those done at the hands (and feet) of Jesus. When students have been taught the stories of Jesus’ miracles as younger children, they have had time to integrate the details into their understanding of who Jesus was. In Confirmation they can then wrestle with their faith in Jesus as a miracle worker and the question of what they can do when the miracles seem too hard to believe. 

The Sound of My Child’s Voice: Choosing Our New Church Home

A few months ago I wrote about our family’s task of finding a new worshiping community for the next couple of years. While many families struggle for months or even years to find a church where they feel comfortable, spiritually fed/challenged, and at home, it didn’t take us nearly that long, for the sole reason that in the community in which we live we really only had two options to choose from. 

That means that we have been able to bounce back and forth over more than one Sunday (because every church has an “off” Sunday once in a while) to get a real feel for the life of the community and the worship style of each.

Both are lovely churches. If only one of these had been available to us, we would have been satisfied with our new church community. Picking one over the other doesn’t mean that one was bad and one was good. In the end it was about where we felt the most comfortable, where we felt the most fed and challenged, and where we felt the most at home. 

Let me describe each briefly...