If you make a reference to a story from Judeo-Christian scripture, odds are many people will be familiar with it. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Noah’s ark and the great flood, Moses leading the Hebrew people to freedom, the animals among the nativity scene at Jesus’ birth, the Good Samaritan who helped a neighbor in need—these stories have been told again and again to share a certain message.
What exactly that message is might depend on who is telling the story and whom they’re telling it for, says Meredith Anne Miller, a pastor and parent with 25 years of experience working in youth and family ministry. Children’s Bibles, for example, often place a heavy emphasis on obedience. She says this isn’t helpful for cultivating faith in kids who are still getting to know God, let alone deciding if they want to live the way God asks them to.
“All scripture for kids is interpreted” to make it kid accessible, which is a good thing, Miller says. But “because of that, children’s Bibles, more than other types of resources, are going to be interpreted by the writer’s theological framework.” What are families to do if they’re not sure they agree with the message their children’s Bible is sending? Do parents need to become scripture scholars to pass on the faith to their kids?
“Most families I hear from tend to look at the Bible, because it’s giant with a lot of complexities, and just think they can’t discuss it with kids. And they can,” says Miller. “It’s storytelling. You and your kids do stories all the time. You do bed time stories and book stories and movie stories and TV stories. Any parent or caregiver who can tell a story can talk about the Bible with their kids.”
To that end, Miller’s new book, Wonder (Worthy Books), is not a children’s Bible. Rather, it’s a “grownup’s guide to exploring the Bible with children.” And the interpretive lens she hopes is clear throughout the book’s 52 conversations is that from beginning to end, in every scripture story, God is good.
Why do we need guidance on exploring the Bible together?
Historically, scripture was passed down through community storytelling. Then we had massive media and technology shifts that brought about a centralized, almost gatekeeping perspective on Bible stories. People started to share these stories by using whatever cartoon or curriculum a company had created. A lot of times, the storytelling was creative or felt fresh, and using those tools brought stories to life for kids.
When you start moving into the formal publishing era and videobased storytelling, that became outsized. There was a sense that this was the only way to share these stories, which sends the message to parents or caregivers that they don’t have to know how to tell these stories because a product can do it for them. It sends the message that they aren’t capable. That’s a loss, and that’s not true.
It can feel uncomfortable if you don’t feel like you know the Bible very well. But it doesn’t have to be formal or fancy. There is a need for parents and caregivers to reclaim their voices as storytellers. They need to feel confident that they can do this.
When the Bible is presented from some sort of institutional space, then our only role is to receive it. There’s a need for families to practice how they talk about scripture together. It’s not just a grownup telling a story, and a kid responding to it. Storytelling becomes an onramp for a collective conversation. That takes practice.
Why is it important for parents or caregivers to be involved in exploring the Bible with kids?
A related aspect to the production of kid storytelling is that the interpretive lens is often a moralistic one. Moralism is marketable, and products that promise your kid will become a good kid after engaging with these Bible stories sell.
And yet we have research on how moralistic faith systems, even the ones that sound like Christianity, leave kids believing that the whole project of their faith is to be more good and less bad. They develop a strong sense of what behaviors a good Christian does and does not do. When that idea takes root, the Bible just becomes a book that tells you what goes on which list, and that’s it.
The most effective way to break out of that is to introduce scripture as something better and different in your family faith culture. Scripture is a mess sometimes. It’s not always clear. It’s deeply ancient. Scripture tells our story, who God is and what God is like, honest things about the world, and invites our questions. If we want to help kids see scripture that way, we have to have a hand in that. Usually, that’s not what you find if you just grab something and plug and play.
The family is integral. We’ve learned in family faith research just how much family wins. There’s a huge opportunity in that.
What’s different about the way an adult should explore scripture with kids compared to how they would explore it on their own or with other adults?
With kids, you’re talking about who God is and what God’s like. We’re asking, “What do you think of that? Do you agree that God is that way? Have you ever experienced God that way?” And we create safety for all answers.
There is more to how one studies scripture; you can do other interesting, valuable, edifying things with scripture. But for children, their first questions are: “Is there a God and what is God like and why do we say so?” That’s where their faith formation starts.
From the things that resonate with our kids from that conversation, we move into further exploration. It allows kids to respond to scripture by asking questions, expressing how they feel, or talking about their favorite parts.
Adults who identify as Christians usually already believe there is a God who acts a certain way because of these stories. So a lot of times adults come to scripture and ask, “What about wisdom? What about guidance? What about being nudged toward greater faithfulness?” because we have already decided God is trustworthy.
But children haven’t decided that yet. If we make scripture just about what you are supposed to do with what you learned, we end up hijacking the process of getting to know God through it.
Do we need a bunch of children’s Bibles or can we just use whatever Bible we have?
Some of this probably depends on how comfortable you are with scripture. You’re not a bad Christian parent if you don’t feel like you’re good at talking about the Bible. There’s no shame in using resources that are available to you. But nobody needs them.
We had a short season with a few kids’ Bibles in our home. I changed half the words, but my kids liked the art, and the art was super helpful for storytelling. Children’s Bibles are also nice because they offer different lengths. For very young kids, a whole story needs to be pretty short. We had a baby Bible with an eight-line rhyming poem and a single picture for each story. Eventually, my kids wanted to hear more, so I started telling Bible stories in the car, and we got rid of all the kids’ Bibles.
If you are selecting a Bible for your kids, remember you get to be discerning. I would look at what they do with Genesis 3, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday, and ask yourself: How does this feel for what our family would hope our kid would hear?
What’s a scripture story that children’s bibles often tell in a problematic way? How might you frame it differently?
There’s a story about a little boy who Jesus brings into the crowd to say the kingdom of God belongs to children. The kid doesn’t do anything or say anything. Jesus is talking about the reign of God and what it looks, feels, and sounds like, and Jesus pulls this boy up to make this point in a culture where kids don’t matter.
There is a kids’ Bible that says that when Jesus asked the boy to come into the crowd, he obeyed right away. He didn’t hesitate to come and do what Jesus asked—and you, too, can be obedient like the child was.
None of that’s in the story. It comes from an adult’s predetermined idea that children need to learn to be obedient to God. When they do that, we miss that Jesus was placing value on children in a culture where not everyone was seen as equal. But it is common for the takeaway to become about whether a person in the story was obedient, especially in kids’ resources. That usually is not the main thing the writer wanted to highlight.
Instead, we could ask, “Isn’t it fascinating that Jesus grabbed someone seen as low? What do you think people were thinking or feeling as this was happening? What do you think the boy thought when he got home that night? How would he have told his friends and family about what happened to him? Do you think he wanted to be brought in as an example? Did he have a choice? Why do you think Jesus did this? Do you think Jesus had other reasons the storyteller didn’t give us for why he wanted to say this to the community that day?”
When you have stories with plot gaps, you get to have fun with all this extra wondering space. Those questions are so much more fun and rich. Kids love questions that have no right or wrong answer. They can be successful in that.
We need to assume God is a character in the story and ask what God is up to and why. Let’s assume people are not displeasing God if they feel hesitation, doubt, or uncertainty, and ask if the people in this story might have felt that way. When we open that up for kids, it helps them understand that God is not a get-it-right-or-else kind of God, which is what a heavy obedience emphasis can often communicate.
If an adult thinks a story is not appropriate for their kid yet, should they just avoid it entirely or should they amend it?
I tend to advocate that we skip it. Some kids will feel tricked if you make too many edits to meet them in their age, and then they read it for real later and notice it is different. That doesn’t seem worth it to me compared to just saving it until they’re old enough to encounter that story on its own terms.
Ask yourself if you can tell the story in a way that feels kid accessible and still faithful to the story. Maybe paraphrase or leave out some of the details, but don’t alter the main point.
I have told the story of baby Moses to kids as young as 2. You do have to leave out the genocide of young children. But you can say, “There was a mean pharaoh hurting God’s people, but God had a plan to save them, and it started with a baby that was saved.” You do not mention that all the other babies were killed, but you acknowledge this story starts in a hard, sad time, and God kept Moses safe because God was going to free the people. That’s kid accessible.
You can tell the Exodus story without the plagues or needing to explain what happened at Passover. You can say something like, “God kept doing things to demonstrate God’s power is greater than Pharaoh’s power, until finally Pharaoh was convinced.”
Eventually, there is a Passover story that’s important. Nobody’s claiming that saving the Passover story until they’re older means it doesn’t matter. It matters. But if you try to make it unscary, you miss something important about the movement of God to set the people free.
How did you decide which stories to include in Wonder?
I wanted to create something that would help somebody gain a sense of the narrative arc of scripture and see the bigger story. It’s great and easy to tell a lot of Jesus stories; Jesus stories are awesome. But focusing on them exclusively, or primarily, can perpetuate the idea that we’re not engaging with the Hebrew Bible because it is all mean and sad. There are actually a lot of wonderful stories in the Hebrew Bible. So I wanted to include enough Hebrew Bible to help kids and adults get their bearings on how those stories fit in the best ways. If the goal is to help kids understand the whole book, we have to include it.
So Wonder includes 10 stories from the Pentateuch, 10 stories through the rest of the Hebrew Bible, 10 Jesus stories, 10 stories from Acts to Revelation, and then Easter and Christmas stories.
I say to kids a lot, “I think God dreams of a world that works in ways that match who God is.” So I wanted to have some stories that help point to God’s deep affection for this world, stories about people being invited to be partners in God’s work, how that went, what was good or hard for them, and stories that show God on the move toward making God’s dream come true.
In Wonder, each story includes icons throughout the pages for things like: key images, words, or numbers; historical context; genre; fun facts. Why is it important for kids to know these things?
They don’t need to know all of them. Part of the goal was to write the book in a way that could be multi-use. So you have the text of scripture and paraphrases; you can use whichever you prefer.
If you’re exploring stories with a younger kid, you might just tell them the story and ask what they liked about it and ask them questions along the way or at the end. If we consider the boy who was brought in by Jesus to the crowd, we might ask: “I wonder if he wanted to be in front of everybody or if he was shy? I wonder how you would’ve felt if Jesus picked you?” There are no right or wrong answers. They just invite kids into the story and start conversations. It helps reading the Bible not feel like lessons, which is a good thing.
The icons with margin notes become helpful for older kids as they start saying, “I’ve heard this story already.” Then those commentary and context notes can bring freshness to the familiar and help a kid who is getting to know scripture well have something they weren’t aware of before.
Many of us are aware that the Bible is complex and these pieces matter. Even if you don’t necessarily tell them to your kids or if you’re saving them for when your kids are older, they’re in there for you. You have to decide how you tell the story to your kid. But these are some ways you might talk about this story when the time comes to bring it up. It lets you cycle around at different ages and draw on different things at different times.
What kinds of questions do kids tend to ask while exploring the Bible? And how can adults prepare to answer them?
There’s a lot of why: “Why did God do this and not that? Why did the person respond like that? Why, why, why, why, why?” Sometimes we know and can share, and sometimes we don’t. And that’s awesome, because you get to say, “I don’t know. What do you think? Why might that have been?”
Part of being prepared for their questions is focusing on: What do we know about who God is and what God cares about, or what God was trying to accomplish? Often those answers provide clues for why.
In the sea of resources that often assume that the answer to the question is, “Because obedience makes God happy,” that’s usually the wrong answer. Be mindful as adults that likely the answer is connected to something about who God is or what God is doing in the world. If we follow those breadcrumbs, we might find ourselves close to the actual answer.
Another thing to be prepared for is that sometimes the whys kids wonder about are connected to the fact that the Bible is from a different time, place, and culture. You might respond to your kid’s questions by saying, “The characters in these stories lived in a world that was different than ours and that I don’t really understand.”
It’s helpful to keep seeding that the world of scripture and the culture of the community were their own things. Try to be curious about it instead of assuming that the Bible’s world is the same as contemporary Western worlds. Just expressing that the reason you have no idea is because that world was different is helpful, even if we don’t know the answer to the question.
What if my kid reaches a conclusion that doesn’t align with what we believe about God? They say, “I think that happened because God didn’t like that person.” But we believe God loves everyone.
Start with curiosity anytime your kid gives a statement, thought, or faith response. You can say, “That’s interesting. Tell me more about why that’s what you think. I’d like to hear more.”
The older they get, the more this becomes a dialogue. Even if they are wrong, if they offer things and we correct quickly, we send the message that they’re not an active part of this conversation. They are. And sometimes we think our kids are wrong, and they’re not. That’s part of why we want the conversation to keep going.
Keep your voice cheerful and curious. Pay attention to how your body and voice sound when you say, “I’m not sure about that, because God loves everyone. So I don’t know if those actions really fit who God is and what God’s like. What do you think?” Closing it out with a rhetorical tone implies that they can respond with, “No, I think God didn’t like him.”
It is OK for your kid to be wrong about something minor for some time. That is not firm and final. The greater value is in being a family that talks about this stuff. If you’re a family that talks about this stuff, then you can circle back. There’s a way to do ongoing course correction as long as you’re a family that talks about it.
So pause in the moment when you think, That’s dead wrong, and acknowledge the point is to have a good conversation, because that will lead to future good conversations.
What’s the most important thing for kids to know about the Bible?
We want kids to come to the Bible with a narrative point of view. It will serve them well as they start their own study and exploration of the Bible. It displaces the idea that the Bible answers every question or is an instruction manual for scenarios they might face that nobody in scripture did.
Those kinds of expectations often leave a kid disappointed. It’s OK if you wish the Bible was more like an instruction manual. But when you know it isn’t, that’s more helpful than having treated it that way until it failed.
We want our kids to see that scripture helps us know who God is and why God can be trusted. The way the writers of scripture make their case for God’s trustworthiness is rooted in the world they lived in and what they thought would show that best. Sometimes that feels really removed. But these storytellers aim to say, “I believe that Yahweh, God of Israel revealed in Jesus Christ our Lord, is a trustworthy God. Let me tell you the story.”
This article also appears in the October 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 10, pages 24-28). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Unsplash/Ben White
