One morning I read the Parable of the Mustard Seed to my four-year-old. He knows something about seeds and plants already, since he has watched the sunflower seeds he planted grow mammoth and yellow all summer. But, to ensure he has some context, I explain that a mustard seed is also very small—smaller even than a sunflower seed—yet grows into a large plant. I read the story. He sits in silence. Then his eyes widen in wonder as he asks the question pressing on his young soul: “What does a ketchup seed grow into?”
Story in the Bible
What is a story for? We might be tempted to say “entertainment.” Stories certainly can and do entertain. Yet some of those great stories from what we call The Tradition can be less than entertaining; Flannery O’Connor, for example, tells some difficult, downright shocking stories that are not at all what I would choose for simple evening entertainment.
Perhaps stories are meant to teach. Some stories do seem, like Aesop’s Fables, to have a didactic goal in mind. Especially we might think that religious literature is written for spiritual education (Pilgrim’s Progress, perhaps). Paul says in Romans 15 that all the Old Testament Scriptures were “written for our learning” (v. 4, KJV). Are the stories of the Bible then educational? Do Bible stories have a scope and sequence?
Literature (the grown-up word for “all the best stories”) leads us into the great conversation about God and Man and Truth, not in a didactic or propositional format, but through the means of plot, setting, and characters. As Leland Ryken says, “Literature conveys a sense of life—a sense of how the writer thinks and feels about what really exists, what is right and wrong, what is valuable and worthless. Literature can be true to reality and human experience as well as being the embodiment of a true proposition. Literature is true whenever we can say about its portrayal of life, ‘This is the way life is.’”[1] This is what a story is for: to tell the way life is.[2]
We can see from simple experience that the Bible is full of stories—is, in fact, a meta-story.[3] And we know fundamentally that the Bible is true because it is divine revelation. The Bible is true in a literal or historical sense—it communicates true facts about events that transpired—and it is also true in a higher since, communicating what Francis Schaeffer calls “True Truth.”[4] Since the Bible is at once infallible and literary,[5] we can be confident that its “portrayal of life” is true—the truest there is, in fact.
Meditating on these few truths about stories and about the Bible, how can we draw children into the great conversation the Bible is having about God and Man? We can feed them stories, and we can let them eat.
Story Diet
New bank tellers are trained to identify counterfeit bills not by examining the fakes but by repeated exposure to the real thing. Once the look and feel of the genuinely valuable thing has imprinted in the mind, the knowledge is ingrained, integrated, and irrevocable.
The mind of a child is especially wired for story. While the “ABC Song” is a fine pneumonic device, it is probably not the lullaby one croons to the baby—the song-stories of “Hush Little Baby” or “Bye Baby Bunting” suit better. From these earliest moments children learn what a story is (most often, someone went somewhere and did something)—and the pleasure it gives.
The first step in presenting Bible stories to little ones is to give them lots of the best stories, starting with nursery rhymes[6] and moving on to folk tales, fairy tales, and myths, peppered all in between with the best of the last century’s picture books (and a side of poetry for good measure). Bible stories themselves, of course, are presented from the very beginning, either read from the Bible for a time of family devotion or perhaps told from memory by Mama at bedtime.
Ensuring children have access to many wonderful stories develops in them the power of listening well to a story and the taste for excellent stories. They desperately need these faculties to appreciate and understand the literature of the Bible. The Bible has no prerequisite of course—not even literacy is needed to hear and accept the Good News. But stories operate like spices. Throw them in at the end, and your dish will be just fine—the flavor will be there. But add them in to the hot fat at the very start, and the flavors take on a depth, subtlety, and intensity that is greatly to be desired. When childhood is a pot simmering with the complex flavor of stories, the literature of the Bible need not be an acquired taste; it can be truly “sweeter than honey, than honey from the honeycomb” (Psalm 19:10, NIV).
Eat Up
In some ways, the diet provided by stories does not satiate the children; it makes them hungrier! But when we are reading the Bible, that is exactly what we want—a child full of good stories and hungry for more. The most important thing to do at that point is to let them eat. Set the story of Scripture before them as they listen with full attention. Let the words speak for themselves. Do not force the point or summarize or rehash the main theme; “He resists forcible feeding and loathes predigested food,” as Charlotte Mason says.[7] The stories of the Bible are strong enough to bear their own weight.
Often, it can be helpful to set the scene (or the table, to continue the metaphor). One might briefly recall with the children the events of the previous story. Perhaps show them a picture of a winepress, or vineyard, or sling, or honeycomb (a real honeycomb to eat is even better!). Defining a word may be necessary but only if it is essential to understanding the story. Most other words are better learned by repeated exposure in context. Setting the table is brief; only a moment or two is needed. Do not do or say too much to give away the story. It may also be appropriate to pray together for God’s Spirit to impress His Word upon your hearts. Then open your Bible: “take and eat.”
Read aloud from the Bible the story you have chosen, clearly and with due expression. Proper intonation can easily bridge a lack of knowledge in children’s vocabulary, and reading with real interest on your part can encourage a mirror interest in your listeners. Read one time, and only for as long as the children are giving their full attention. On some days, this may mean the story ends in the middle, to be picked up again the next time. Pressing on with an inattentive audience is fruitless and will make a habit of hearing without really hearing.
For elementary aged children, you may ask them to “tell back” what they have heard after the reading. This is not a quiz on the details but an opportunity for the child to synthesize and put into his or her own words the story he or she has received without any specific prompting. For children older than elementary aged, a simple discussion might ensue, not with leading questions, but with one or two open-ended questions, such as “What does this remind you of?” The answer may be nothing. That is acceptable. Come back tomorrow. Like the mustard seed growing and the leaven in the bread, the spiritual progress is happening slowly and imperceptibly.[8]
“But Don’t I Need To . . . ?”
Should we not tell them what it all means? Or at least give some practical application? My caution would be no, probably not. It is true that we run the risk of the children entirely missing the point. (What would grow from a ketchup seed?) But the risks that come from overexplaining or extracting the moral are far greater. “Stories suffer misinterpretation when we don’t submit to them simply as stories.”[9] We will speak volumes by our example in letting God’s story do its quiet, leavening work on us, rather than attempting to wield His stories for our own didactic purposes, however well-intentioned.
Charlotte Mason cautions about Bible lessons: “Probably very little hortatory teaching is desirable. The danger of boring young listeners by such teaching is great. . . . On the whole we shall perhaps do well to allow the Scripture reading itself to point the moral.”[10] We can take confidence, however, in the power of the Biblical stories. We know, of course, that these stories are even more than merely stories; they are “alive and active” stories, “dividing soul and spirit” (Heb. 4:12, NIV). They are not trite or contrived stories “of the disposable kind, made to be discarded like empty cartons once the important ‘stuff’ that was packed in them has been removed.”[11]
But Mason also encourages her readers with wisdom from Ecclesiastes: “In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good” (11:6, KJV). Jesus Himself explained that the seed does not always prosper where it is sown, but, when it does, it produces a bountiful harvest, “some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty” (Mt. 13:8, ESV). So, despite the seeming “foolishness” of the method, we “labor on in weakness and rejoicing,”[12] inviting these little ones along as we delight in the Story together.
[1] Leland Ryken, How to Read the Bible As Literature (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984), 21.
[2] I do not mean that stories should be mere realism. Often it takes a story set in a time and place not at all like life to convey the depth of a universal truth or experience.
[3] Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 40.
[4] Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There (Downers Grove, Ill: Intervarsity, 1998), 123.
[5] I do not argue here for whether the Bible is literature. Even if we were inclined to reject the overwhelming consensus among Christian thinkers of the past and present who argue for the literary nature of the Bible, we are still left with the question: what does Charles Dickens or Fyodor Dostoevsky have that the Bible lacks? Is the Bible less than literature? Surely not, though it must be more.
[6] “The Benefits of Mother Goose,” Ambleside Online, https://amblesideonline.org/art-mother-goose.
[7] Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education (1923; repr., Living Books, 2017), 109.
[8] The process I have outlined here is a lesson a la Charlotte Mason: a single reading given full attention, followed by narration and optional discussion. See Home Education (1905; repr., Living Books, 2017), 231–33.
[9] Peterson, 43.
[10] Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, 166.
[11] Vigen Guroian, Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 32.
[12] CityAlight, “Yet Not I but through Christ in Me,” Yet Not I, 2018.
Recent Comments