The Noah’s Ark story should come with a content warning.
The Beginner’s Bible. The Precious Moments Bible. The Jesus Storybook Bible. Children’s Bibles remain an incredibly popular way for parents to teach their kids the faith. Roxy and Katelyn both remember the Bible stories that left a deep impression on them (a female spy! Fake arm hair!). But some of those stories can be confusing or downright scary. And when taught within a legalistic framework, they can turn faith into an obedience training program rather than a relationship with a gracious parent.
That’s why our guest on this episode, Meredith Miller, is equipping parents to teach the faith from a posture of curiosity and connection. Miller is a pastor and author of “Wonder: 52 Conversations to Help Kids Fall in Love with Scripture.” She previously served as curriculum director for the children’s ministry at Willow Creek Community Church. She explains why the Noah’s Ark story should not be taught to kids … and walks us through how she teaches children about the cross in developmentally appropriate ways.
Plus: We break down the top scariest Bible stories for kids.
Guest:
Meredith Miller is co-pastor of Pamona Valley Church and author of “Wonder: 52 Conversations to Help Kids Fall in Love with Scripture” and Woven: Nurturing a Faith Your Kid Doesn’t Have to Heal From. She writes at the Kids + Faith substack.
This transcript was generated using AI tools and may contain minor transcription errors.
KATELYN BEATY: Roxy, growing up, what was little Roxy’s favorite Bible story? Why do I feel stumped by this? Were you a heathen child?
ROXANNE STONE: But also is it Rahab? The woman who lets the guys down by the rope.
BEATY: She helps some Israelite dudes escape.
STONE: Yeah, and then she escapes with them and then marries somebody and then I think is actually the grandmother of Boaz who Ruth marries.
BEATY: Oh, so it’s all connected.
STONE: Well yeah, it was like welcoming the outsider or the immigrant ran in this family. Anyway, I like the stories about women.
BEATY: Do you remember the story about Jacob tricking his father? For some reason, as a child, this fascinated me. Jacob wants his father Isaac’s blessing. So he pretends to be Esau his brother, and Isaac is very poor in sight, so he’s not gonna be able to see. But their mom, Rebecca, is like, Jacob, let me help you fashion some fake hair to put on your arms. I just was always captivated by Jacob wearing fake arm hair. You don’t hear about that very much. Maybe that’s why I was drawn to it. Esau was apparently a very hairy man. Hair suit.
From Religion News Service, this is Saved by the City, a podcast from two Christian women re-engaging faith with our big girl pants on. I’m Katelyn Beaty.
STONE: And I’m Roxy Stone.
BEATY: So do you remember what kind of Bible you had growing up?
STONE: I had a Precious Moments Bible. Oh my god. I think maybe that was given to me by a grandparent early on or at birth. I don’t know. What about you?
BEATY: I had one — I didn’t realize, all I knew about it was how the images looked, or the illustrations. I didn’t know the name of it as a child. It’s called — so I did a bit of sleuthing — it’s called The Beginner’s Bible: Timeless Children’s Stories. It was published in 1989, and the characters are all kind of cartoonish and have these really big eyes, like the Simpsons.
STONE: It’s blasphemous.
BEATY: It’s still in print from Zonderkids.
STONE: Yes, right, naturally.
BEATY: You know, because I’m in book publishing, I can check book sales, and they’re not a hundred percent accurate but they give you a good estimate. Sales for this were 1.6 million lifetime, including 7,000 just in the last week, which for a children’s Bible that was published in 1989 seems like a lot.
STONE: Well, has it been updated?
BEATY: I think the visuals have been. New animation. Yeah, but still like cartoon illustrations. And not all the Bible stories — the highlights, the ones you would expect would be most interesting to kids. That’s where I learned about Jacob and his fake arm hair. That illustration in particular stood out to me.
STONE: There’s also the Jesus Storybook Bible, which was not around when we were kids, but it has been the best-selling children’s Bible of the past decade with six million copies sold, translated into more than thirty languages. The pictures — maybe they’re universal, or maybe they change them per language. I don’t know. I think I’ve heard adults talking about how moving the Jesus Storybook Bible is.
BEATY: I feel like that’s become the quintessential mainstream evangelical children’s Bible. Really? Yeah. There’s also The Biggest Story Bible Storybook.
STONE: Does that mean it only focuses on the biggest stories?
BEATY: I haven’t read it. I assume that the author is trying to put all of scripture within this bigger story about what God is doing, and so offering some theological interpretation.
STONE: I remember some of the Precious Moments illustrations actually. They were precious.
BEATY: You don’t hear much about Precious Moments these days.
STONE: No, but I remember the David and Goliath one. That illustration, and also the illustration of Daniel and the Lions’ Den — not like after the lions turned out to be sweet. Oh, and then I really remember the furnace one and the three guys whose names I thought were drilled into my head forever because of the song, and I’m forgetting.
BEATY: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Yes.
STONE: Yes. Yes, that was a cute Precious Moments illustration also.
BEATY: They were being martyred or persecuted and thrown into the flames because they refused to worship an idol, but they’re standing — the image I have in my mind is them standing in the fire and not being burned. Like the flames are going.
STONE: A fourth — there’s a fourth figure. Yeah. Yeah. And also I think if I remember correctly, the illustration, or a different illustration, had just the big toe of the idol that they were supposed to be worshiping in the image.
BEATY: It’s always the big toe. Well, so a lot of these stories have vivid detail and this interesting memorable aspect to them that does appeal to kids. Like they’re dramatic or heroic. The story of David and Goliath — that’s a great children’s story. And then there’s others that, once you get into the text, they’re more troubling than you were taught as a child, when you get a little bit older.
STONE: Do you have one in mind? Perhaps one with pairs of animals and a flood?
BEATY: So we had a children’s book — not a children’s Bible, but an illustrated children’s book — by a wonderful illustrator named Peter Spier. It was a wordless retelling of the Noah’s Ark story. It seems to end well for Noah and his family and all the animals on the ark, but the context of God commanding that all living things on the earth — except for Noah and two of every kind of animal — be destroyed seems so counter to who God seems to be in the person of Jesus. Like, why would a loving God destroy the earth?
STONE: At some point I started to go, wait a minute. What happened to all the rest of the people? What happened to all the rest of the animals? Are we supposed to imagine floating bodies around the ark?
BEATY: Stories that were presented as cute actually end up being far darker than we probably realized as kids. I feel like this is connected to broader conversations about how faith was presented to us as kids, and ways that we and our peers have deconstructed or moved away from that — because I think a lot of us would say that we were exposed to ideas or stories about God or Jesus that were confusing or troubling.
STONE: And also at the same time being taught all these ideas about Jesus and love and forgiveness. I think there’s a lot of work that went into trying to make that somehow connected for children. But then as you get older and you start asking those questions, I don’t feel like there’s a really robust effort to try to discuss that further — for kids to sort of complicate beyond… I’m trying to remember, as I got older and went into junior high and high school, what were the conversations about Noah’s Ark? I don’t remember. I mostly just remember what I got as a little kid.
BEATY: I also feel like there was often an attempt, in a Sunday school context or from our parents or Vacation Bible School, to draw out a lesson from the story. So, therefore, this is what you should remember about God, or about you and your behavior or attitude and God. And when you then encounter a God in scripture who is willing to wipe out almost every living thing on the face of the earth, or tell the Israelites to kill their neighbors, I think it can be hard for a kid to feel like God is loving and good.
STONE: Right. And I think that’s the key thing — what we learn from a lot of those lessons, those “let’s boil it down to a kid’s lesson” lessons, is: Noah obeyed God and loved God, that’s why Noah lived and God saved him. And Abraham chose to obey God and follow God, and so that’s why Abraham became the father of many nations. Moses doubted God and that’s why he didn’t get to go into the promised land. And so you get all of these like — you do get lessons that are, if you do this, you get rewarded, or you get punished.
BEATY: Yeah.
STONE: And they’re very dramatic and they’re scary. And I do think that, as you are attempting to teach kids these morality tales and give the story a moral — because there’s an idea that that’s how kids learn best — you are offering a picture of God that is very like a judge.
BEATY: Yeah, and so then when you hear that, but you also hear Jesus died on the cross for your sins so that God would not punish you —
STONE: Which you hear that all the time too as a kid.
BEATY: And so then you have this image in your mind of like, God wanted to put me on a cross? But he put Jesus instead?
STONE: Yeah, and I would always be like, well, what about all those people in the Old Testament that were alive before Jesus?
BEATY: To say nothing of all the people who lived before Jesus.
STONE: Yes, exactly. But specifically the people that didn’t survive the flood. Well, what if they had just been alive when Jesus was alive?
BEATY: That’s right. It wasn’t their fault that they were born before Jesus. Right. Yes. Okay.
STONE: So we’re gonna talk ourselves right out of Christianity here.
BEATY: Well, not for me, but — I’m kidding. Okay. Our guest today has spent a lot of time equipping parents to better talk to their kids about God, Jesus, the Bible, and all the questions that could come up from that.
STONE: That was Meredith Miller, former Children’s Ministry Director at Willow Creek and author of the books Woven: Nurturing a Faith Your Kid Doesn’t Have to Heal From, and most recently, Wonder: 52 Conversations to Help Kids Fall in Love with Scripture.
BEATY: We’ll hear from Meredith soon about why she thinks Noah’s Ark should not be taught to kids. So speaking of Noah’s Ark, I did take a very informal poll recently gauging which Bible stories were most scary to folks when they were children. So here were the results — the top five scariest Bible stories for kids.
STONE: Alright, coming in at number five: Lot’s wife being turned to salt.
BEATY: That is scary.
STONE: Alright, here’s the verse. In Genesis 19, Lot and his family are told to flee Sodom because it was a super evil place. God warns them not to look back, but Lot’s wife does, and she turns to salt — a pillar of salt — which I wasn’t sure how to imagine as a kid.
BEATY: Yeah, it’s an eerie image. And it also feels so harsh of God. Like, what if she forgot something? Or what if she thought some of our family members are back in Sodom? It feels — what if she just wanted to see what was happening?
STONE: I mean, you don’t always get to see fire raining down from heaven on a city.
BEATY: We do not know the intent of Lot’s wife as she’s turning around.
STONE: But God did, apparently.
BEATY: Yes. Okay. That’s what I always got told. Number four, very similar story to Lot’s wife: Ananias and Sapphira falling down dead.
STONE: Yes.
BEATY: This is Acts 5. And so it doesn’t have the cushion that we sometimes give to Old Testament stories — “God hadn’t fully revealed himself to be just and loving and merciful yet.”
STONE: We didn’t have Jesus yet.
BEATY: Right. This is post-Jesus. So Acts 5 — this was a couple who were very involved in the early church, but they had sold this property and instead of giving it all away, they were intending to keep some for themselves and kind of lie about the amount. And so they each lie to Peter separately and fall dead separately. Again, lying about money, hoarding money that’s meant for the church — bad. But again, they’re struck down dead.
STONE: No second chance, no forgiveness. Alright, coming in at number three: John the Baptist getting beheaded.
BEATY: Yeah.
STONE: I feel like I have seen illustrations of that. I don’t know if it’s in one of those spoof kids’ Bibles where they only illustrate the worst stories? Have you seen — I don’t remember if it ever got printed or if it was more just an online thing, but there were these drawings that were like the worst Bible stories. And they would draw them the way they might have actually happened — like Noah’s Ark and there’s literally arms coming out of the water and animals gasping.
BEATY: Like anatomically realistic.
STONE: Well, sometimes, yeah. More realistic, gruesome. And just including the things that a kids’ Bible doesn’t really include.
BEATY: Yeah.
STONE: Like all the dead bodies after all of those men got circumcised and then Dinah’s family went in and murdered all of them while they were recovering.
BEATY: I don’t even remember that one. Oh my gosh. I feel like I’m learning new Bible stories all the time and I don’t know what that says about me. Number two — I do know this one. Scariest story: King Solomon threatening to cut the baby in half.
STONE: Now, yeah.
BEATY: That one — he has the right intent, to reveal the true mother, and he probably doesn’t intend to actually cut a baby in half. But it’s just the image. It’s the image of cutting a baby in half. For a person who not that long ago was a baby, it’s too real.
STONE: Alright, number one — the scariest Bible story that y’all told us about, by far — is Abraham and Isaac. That makes sense. Yes. So in Genesis 22, we have God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son. They head out alone on the mountain. Abraham ties up Isaac on the altar and is getting ready to kill him. God is pleased that Abraham passed the test and would do this, and then says, okay, you don’t have to.
BEATY: Talk about gaslighting on the part of God. That’s very like, JK, I wasn’t really expecting you to do it. I don’t know. Also, whenever I heard that story as a child, I was thinking of Isaac’s perspective and how weird it would be to be out alone with your father on a mountain and he’s tying you up but not telling you what’s going on —
STONE: And then raising a knife above you?
BEATY: Yeah, it’s very disturbing. Anyway, I wanted to ask you — so you started your career working for a nonprofit that created resources for children’s faith formation.
STONE: A for-profit, but yes.
BEATY: You’re like, very much a for-profit. Okay, so what did you observe there?
STONE: So my very first job out of college was as an associate editor for preschool Sunday school curriculum. So I was developing Sunday school lessons around the Bible for preschoolers, which is exactly what we’ve been talking about. And Group had its own particular angle on how to approach children’s education — for each Bible story, there was one main takeaway that you were supposed to really drill down to. And at the time I liked it. I thought, oh yeah, this makes great sense, there’s all this research, blah blah blah. And not — Group was a great first place to work, I learned a lot. But when I reflect back on some of that, particularly those Sunday school lessons, I do kind of cringe. I mean, I remember one in particular that I always come back to — it’s about the story of Abraham and Lot. They can’t get along anymore with all of their big herds on their land. And so they’re like, okay, we’re gonna divide the land and we’re each gonna take some of it. And Abraham lets Lot choose first. And the whole moral of that story, the one lesson that we boiled it down to, was like, it’s good to share. A very good lesson for preschoolers. We do want young kids to share. We do want young Christian children to know that God likes it when we share. But it’s just so stripped down, with no real meat to that story, and not really giving kids in the end a lot of tools to understand how to approach these Bible stories. I don’t want to get too down on Group, but I think teaching kids the Bible is really, really hard.
BEATY: Well, teaching the Bible is really hard. Yes. Certainly no matter who you’re teaching. I just think there are for a lot of people these steps missing, where then they’re adults and they don’t really know how to make sense of these stories where there is very clearly not a lesson.
STONE: Right. It’s not a fairy tale or whatever where you’re like, and then the moral of the story is —
BEATY: There is also just this question, I think, for some parents who grew up in evangelicalism — they know they want their children to be exposed to something of Christian faith, but they don’t know what to share and what not to share, to say nothing of how to share it. And there’s even the question of, maybe we let our kids figure it out, make a decision and figure it out for themselves later, and not try to force feed a particular understanding of God or the Bible. That would be hard for me if I had kids, I think — not only because I’m marrying an Episcopal priest, but also because I received faith ultimately as a gift that my parents helped to give to me and foster. I would want to offer that to my kids, with the understanding that there are no guarantees. But I think I understand a squeamishness about not wanting to pass along faith in a damaging or destructive way.
STONE: Yeah, I mean I feel squeamish about it. If I had kids, I don’t know where to turn necessarily. And I don’t know exactly what it was that gave me the baggage and malformed my ideas about God. Was it the Noah’s Ark story, or the morality tale that Abraham and Lot got boiled down into? Or like, what were the things that caused me to sort of see God in ways that spread anxiety, or fear of hell, or a real legalistic idea of obedience, and a distrust of the forgiveness offered to me through Jesus — these things that I think I’ve had to wrestle with as an adult. Like, where did they come from?
BEATY: Yeah, it has to be so many factors that shape our view of God in relation to ourselves. It’s been interesting working in book publishing to see — I would say over the last five years — a real uptick in resources for parents or for kids that are definitively not the Jesus Storybook Bible, or that are intentionally presenting a more inclusive view of God. I think some of this is about depictions of people in the Bible, and just recognizing they were not Anglo-Saxon white people living in England. Some of this is about a more accurate ethnic representation of the people of scripture and of Jesus. But also how particular stories are taught — maybe not focusing so much on obedience as we know that God is like this because of how God cares for people on the margins. So it’s just interesting to me that parents do want to give their kids something good, but they’re maybe not gonna find it in your traditional children’s ministry curriculum.
STONE: And that’s why we had to talk to our guest today, Meredith Miller, who is literally writing books about how to teach our kids the Bible differently.
BEATY: Coming up after we give a nice shout-out to the organization that makes Saved by the City possible.
STONE: Religion News Service is an independent, award-winning source of global reporting on religion, spirituality, culture, and ethics.
BEATY: For stories on all the ways religion shapes youngsters, oldsters, and everyone in between, visit religionnews.com.
STONE: We heard from Josie G. this week, who said: “I have been listening to your podcast since 2021, when I discovered it in the middle of a very difficult phase. It shone a light in the dark corridor, and your stories and those of others showed me that what I was experiencing — extreme workplace gender and age-based bullying — was not an isolated case, and hearing others describe their experience so eloquently and deeply helped me to heal. Thanks for podcasting.”
BEATY: Thanks, Josie. Thanks for listening. That was really sweet to receive.
STONE: Yeah, it was.
BEATY: We’d love to hear from other people who have nice things to say, as well as people who have ideas for future guests and topics. So drop us a review wherever you listen to Saved by the City and shoot us an email at [email protected].
We are delighted today to be joined by Meredith Miller, a pastor and writer and author of the new book Wonder: 52 Conversations to Help Kids Fall in Love with Scripture: A Grown-Up’s Guide to Exploring the Bible with Children. Thanks so much for being with us, Meredith. It’s good to see you.
MEREDITH MILLER: It’s good to see you as well. Thank you for having me.
STONE: Hi, Meredith.
BEATY: Before we get into more of your work helping adults talk to children about faith and scripture and the Bible, I would love our listeners to hear why you wanted to write this book specifically for adults engaging kids with scripture, instead of like a children’s Bible.
MILLER: Which there are many. Yeah, there are many to choose from. There are. And part of what I really love is helping adults feel like they can do this. Because kids’ faith has been sort of held at a certain value of like, this is very important. It also got professionalized in some ways that I think were really unhelpful — where that’s something the church then needs to do, because you can’t risk something so valuable in the hands of a common parent. So a lot of what I love best is the things that help adults feel like, oh, I could say that. And so this combination of paraphrased Bible stories — where it’s like, well, if you don’t know how it sounds, borrow my version until you cultivate your own kid voice. The problem with the kids’ Bible is you have to make one interpretive choice and then that goes to print and that’s how you’ve told the story forever and always. But the Bible doesn’t actually work that way. It is a multi-interpreted kind of text where you have all these layers happening, and it depends on what community is reading it, and it depends on what question that community is bringing to it. And there’s not a lot that you give to a child the way you would a kids’ Bible that then also helps the kid think about those layers and the interpretive conversations. And so I was really trying to think about, could this be one tool an adult has that goes more in that direction?
BEATY: That gives them agency in knowing what kind of interpretation to offer their kid in a developmentally sensitive way. Yes. We’re gonna get to the developmental sensitivity, because I feel like a lot of our listeners — and maybe us as well — have a memory of being presented with a Bible story or a theological teaching as a child, and it scared the heck out of us. Well, it scared the hell out of us.
STONE: Well, that was the point.
BEATY: And we look back and we’re like, why was it presented that way to a five-year-old?
STONE: Right. Yeah. We’re gonna get into that. I never get over Noah’s Ark as being the kids’ story, when it’s like, oh, they all died.
MILLER: The ark was surrounded by carcasses. It is the number one story I want eliminated from all resources for children. Like, I will never stop being willing to pull my soapbox out at a moment’s notice to be like, stop telling kids this story. Yeah.
BEATY: Which is so funny because it is probably one of the most — if not the most — popular children’s Bible stories, because people think, oh, it involves animals, and isn’t it cute to have a diorama where you have little pairs of animals going into the ark? So you don’t have any thoughts on how to teach that one to kids.
STONE: Just don’t.
MILLER: Don’t. Because what you actually need to teach starts with a God who feels deeply saddened by extreme evil. And so either a kid has no idea what that means — so why go there yet? It’s gonna come for them in time, developmentally — or they really know what that means, in which case that kid needs care. There are so many places where what the story is about is not accessible to a kid. And so then you’re gonna tell a different story that is not what the story is about, which becomes all about Noah’s obedience, right, in order to scare the hell out of the kid. So just — it doesn’t work. You cannot do that story unless you change that story into something it’s not trying to say.
STONE: Okay, so do you have an opposite? That’s the one you want eliminated that always gets taught to kids — is there one that you’re like, why don’t we teach this to kids? This is the story they really need to know.
MILLER: It’s not that we necessarily leave them out. Hagar, I think, would be one. But I’m like, this should be everybody’s. Because it takes our so-called hero Abraham — which isn’t the approach we take anyway — and it shows a huge mistake and a huge misuse of power, and a person from the margins, and the God who is there for them in that. And so you have so much happening in her inner world that is emotionally resonant to how life really is. There’s just an honesty to her. And then you have this very important picture of God, especially because of her relationship to Abraham. The story is always for everyone. So I just feel like that’s one of those times where we should not be scared to introduce kids to God’s people from the jump as deeply flawed, and God being able to be engaged in that. It helps them understand all the other stories that will follow.
BEATY: I like it. I don’t think I heard about Hagar until college, sadly. So in your new book, Wonder, as well as your previous book, Woven, you’re trying to equip parents to talk with their children about faith that opens up conversation, that starts from a place of trust and safety and relational connection. How have churches or parents approached faith with their kids in not this way?
MILLER: Two of the most common — I think both are tempting, or at least understandable, but ultimately unhelpful. One would be a moralistic faith system, a system where adults say, can I use Christianity to raise a good kid? And it’s fundamentally a character-counts kind of project about their honesty or their patience or whatnot, and then faith and the Bible are just the examples of what to do, how to be those things. And then the other that’s related is an obedience training paradigm — which kind of adds on, doesn’t God want my kid to be a good kid? And isn’t the point an obedient child who does what God would want them to do? And that really misses in a huge way how much the biblical pattern is God introducing themselves to people and sort of showing their cards about why, hey, I think that following me, trusting me, could be a life-giving thing. God always goes first before people respond in what we might look for as obedience. And so at a minimum you’ve reversed order — you’ve asked kids to obey a God they don’t know or trust instead of helping them get to know God first and then saying, how might we respond to that? But beyond that minimum, both moralistic faith systems and obedience training paradigms basically tell kids that the point of faith is to be good, and that mainly it’s all a project in managing their own goodness and minimizing their own badness. Which is incredibly exhausting, often disillusioning. And those two themes are just incredibly pervasive. They show up in lots of resources. They show up in just the way we speak to and about kids. And then they will be major lenses that an adult would bring to the Bible, as far as what it’s supposed to do for kids or how a family’s supposed to use it.
STONE: Hmm.
BEATY: It sounds like you’re saying the central thing is helping children understand the character of God.
MILLER: Yes. A lot of times I’ll say that we want to be with these kids as they get to know God and help them discover if God can be trusted. Because no matter how confident an adult might be that the answer is yes, the kid doesn’t know God yet. They have not had the time or space or experiences of their own. And so it’s really our role to walk with them in that question: can God be trusted, and why would we say so? And what makes that hard to say yes about? And to be a companion with them in that process, more than — I think a lot of people have assumed that if it’s true, then we get to just impose it on children. Which I would say is very disrespectful of children.
BEATY: You’re opening up all sorts of things that I want to come back to.
STONE: I know, I’m thinking about so many. I do suppose there is the sense of, what’s so wrong with teaching kids these moral lessons alongside these Bible verses?
MILLER: It is how a lot of this works — not just curriculum but a lot of kids’ Bibles, right? Moralism’s highly marketable. And parents who have that very good impulse in them of like, well, of course I want an honest kid and a kind kid — those are still good things. What is wrong with it, so to speak, is what it communicates to a kid about who God is and what makes God happy, and all the things they don’t hear about God. They’re introduced to this God of basically list management — here’s all the things that good Christians do, and here’s all the things that good Christians don’t do. And this God of list management is really actually much happier with you when you get these lists right, and really does not like you very much when you don’t. And so God’s love is very conditional in a moralistic system, and very dependent on how the child acts. And then there are all these things they miss. So a lot of my background is research on young people and faith formation, and one of the big themes that you see when they start talking for themselves about their faith is how much there is no grace. Maybe they know it as a vocabulary word, but functionally, it is a very graceless life that they have to live, and they don’t really think they have much choice. The fear side kicks in — God will be so very unhappy with them. And so it’s the connecting the dots from that preschool lesson about sharing, and you jump down to an 18-year-old who’s been steeped in it all the way through. And now they’re fifteen years deep in believing that they have to manage their own goodness all the time, or else.
BEATY: So you previously provocatively mentioned that perhaps we should stop teaching the Noah’s Ark story to children. And I imagine some listeners will be like, well, wait — shouldn’t we teach all of scripture to children? Like at any age, at any time in their development, scripture should be available to them. And you suggest that that is not true. You have two teaching techniques or principles: spiral learning and skip and save. Yes. So tell us about those principles and how they take into account children’s development.
MILLER: Well, and that’s really the reason I say kids don’t need the whole Bible — at least not the whole Bible at every age. They’re developmentally growing, and I think when you ignore that, not only is that not really honoring of a kid, but it’s not really honoring of what scripture is. It’s not a kid’s book. And so the idea of spiral learning would say, well, what I can do is look at the kids I’ve got with me and say, what is true at their level that I can build on later? And I’d think about how I’d take a small piece for now, and I’d circle back again and maybe add a new element. Or I’d circle back and introduce a new emotion that the people were feeling but I didn’t highlight before. Or I’d introduce the kids to a new piece of background context that helps that story come to life more. And I’m expecting, as the adult, that we’re gonna tell the story a lot of times. So I don’t need to one-and-done my story with every piece of important information — I get to filter it based on what’s right for the kid right now, knowing of course there’s more to it, and of course we’ll get there. And so spiral learning is an educational technique that really thinks about complex concepts and making them smaller on purpose, knowing that each time around you add to the complexity. And it really is a respectful concept of complex things. There is a through line between kindergarteners making things into groups of ten and 17-year-olds doing calculus that is based on honoring where they are developmentally and adding layers of complexity on purpose, a little bit at a time. And scripture, I think, is really well served if we do something similar.
Also, when you do something like spiral learning — where you’re doing it small and intentional — in the space you’ve left open by not cramming it full of every single possible thing you could say, the kid gets to join the conversation. There’s just a literal limit to their attention and engagement capacity. If I fill the whole thing up with my words, the thing that goes is what my kid is thinking or feeling or wondering, or what they thought was cool or thought was weird. And so there’s also a reality that we want a conversation, and part of how you get there is — if I focus on something true at their level that I can build on later, we can talk about that right now, and I actually get to hear back from them.
So that’s really the spiral learning side of it. Skip and save is a way to capture the fact that not every story is for every kid at any time. And that doesn’t mean you’re hiding scripture from them — it means you’re saving it until the time when they can actually engage with scripture on its terms. And so I often will say, you could think about whether you can tell that story in a kid-accessible way — like, this is really what it’s about, but I have distilled it into something that meets you in your six-year-old world, or whatever age they may be — versus kiddifying it, which means in order to tell it to you because you’re six, I actually have to turn it into a different story. And that’s really why Noah’s Ark doesn’t pass the test. You can’t tell a version of Noah’s Ark to a young child without kiddifying it and making it about cute animals.
STONE: Yeah.
MILLER: But if you really want to enter this really odd ancient Near Eastern story on its terms in some way, the kid has to be older. They’re likely gonna be much closer to ten, eleven, or twelve in order to meet you in a version that is faithful to scripture and accessible to a child.
STONE: I want to go back for a second to the spiral learning. Maybe you could give us an example — where you would teach it one way to a kindergartner in the grouping of ten, versus the 12-year-old who’s doing algebra, versus the 17-year-old who’s doing calculus.
MILLER: Yeah, so maybe we could just take the creation story — thinking off the top of my head. You can go as young as age two and you do “God made everything,” and you just play around with plant things and animal-themed things and mountains and pictures, and you just do all kinds of creation celebration things. And then when they’re five, you might make that story a little bit longer: we have the story of God that starts with nothing, and then God said light, and then God said land — so it becomes more of a story. And then when they’re about ten is when you say, hey, we have this poem. And so you introduce genre and this idea that this is non-literal, and that a writer had a creative vision for — like, maybe it was kind of like this. And then when they’re in high school, you introduce them to how Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 don’t sound like each other. And they start doing compare and contrast, and they start enjoying — it’s a feature, not a flaw — that these two voices aren’t the same voice. And what is each one hoping that we’ll notice about God?
And you might add in somewhere around ten or eleven: did you know this was like a temple-building kind of story? Every community tells a story of the temple where their God lives. Only our God’s temple is the whole world. And when our God rests at the end, it’s the same as the God sitting on the throne of the temple — only our God just rests in the whole world. And what does that mean if our whole world is just God’s home and God is happy to live there? And so these kinds of things start coming up from before, whereas with their age three, “God made everything and isn’t everything God made good, including you — hooray, God is good because God made everything.” And you just keep layering. And all those new background pieces — genre and context and poetry and blah blah blah — you treat them like fun facts. Not like gotchas, but just like, isn’t that cool? Ooh, and another thing, isn’t that cool? So you also get to take the super familiar story, and each of those layers keeps it fresh instead of just being like, yeah, I know this one. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” — it’s been a memory verse ever since I was four. So that might be one version.
STONE: Man, what about memory verses?
BEATY: What are memory verses? You didn’t do that? In the Methodist church? I assume they just mean verses you’re supposed to memorize.
MILLER: But there are programs for them in a lot of church communities, right? Where you have like a book of them and you get a sticker, or like Bible bucks. And the thing about memory verses is lots of kids can’t memorize — it’s really hard for them. And so why are we featuring and celebrating only the kids who happen to have a particular kind of wiring or skill? If your kid likes to memorize or finds it fun, have fun. But this idea that every kid has to memorize verses —
STONE: — in order to know the Bible.
MILLER: If a kid knows the stories of the Bible, they know the Bible. In fact, I would argue they could probably go further understanding what the Bible’s up to by connecting things through story than they ever could when you pull out these little tiny snippets. And I guarantee you there are people right now remembering all of a sudden the ride into church when they were frantically shoving those words in their head from home to church so they could get them said — and this is a whole thing. And to your point of, I can say it and then it’s gone, just like cramming for any sort of test.
STONE: As were the cheap toys that I got with the Bible bucks. Long gone, along with the verse.
BEATY: Well, it also strikes me that it adds the performance element. If you have moralistic obedience training as your presentation of Christianity to children, and then you add on performance — I want to be a straight-A student because that’s part of what it means to be good — no wonder we have a lot of adult Christians who are extremely anxious about whether or not God loves them if they’re doing everything right and efficiently for God’s glory.
STONE: Absolutely.
BEATY: Okay, so I had emailed you the question: what’s the most difficult portion of the Bible to teach to children in your view? But I want to modify that and ask — how in the world do you teach the cross to children?
MILLER: So when they’re very young, you say that there were some people who didn’t like Jesus and they made a plan to hurt him, and the plan worked, and they hurt Jesus, and he died, and it was a sad day. And his friends were very sad and his followers were very sad and they were very confused and they didn’t know what would happen next. And then immediately in the same story, you say, but three days later, Jesus was alive again. And you use very concrete language — he died and he was alive — because they are concrete children. But you also don’t use any descriptive language other than “hurt him,” because details are not appropriate for young children. And you always make sure to finish the story on the resurrection. You never leave young children hanging out on Good Friday, because that is mean.
And then once they move into more of a story sort of age — often four and up, depending on the kid themselves — I think it’s important to help kids understand some of the historical elements of why Jesus died, more than just the theological ones. They’re often far more confused by how this Jesus that they’ve met, who is so wonderful, who goes to hurting people and who teaches about God’s love and life in these really wonderful ways — how could anyone not like this guy? It’s incredibly confusing to them, because they’ve just heard all good things. And so they often just need help to understand that there were people who did not receive all of this very well. And why would that be? And what are some of the factors in that? And so giving them some of that historical background of how Jesus was received often really helps them understand what’s going on.
And then there becomes a lot more space to play with theological interpretations as well. I’m fascinated how often children are told the story of Good Friday — quote unquote — only it’s not a story. They’re given a theological lecture on theories of atonement. It’s like, but tell them the story, and then see what they notice, or listen to what they ask you about. And I think often through childhood it’s more about describing without details. It’s saying they arrested him, but do we need to go into all of the passion? Probably not. Is it saying he suffered? But do I have to give you the exact details of what that hurt and suffering were? No. So that’s usually a big part of how I think you talk about Good Friday, and I think you talk a lot about the various reactions people have to all of this — the confusion and the sense of loss, and the kind of disillusionment over messianic hope, and the idea that a dead messiah is a useless messiah. All these kinds of things, I think, all kind of come out of that.
STONE: So one of the reasons we wanted to ask you on to the show is because we’ve had a lot of conversations over the course of our podcast — with other guests and with each other — about all of this baggage, right, that we absorbed over the years, most of it unintentionally, given to us by well-meaning Sunday school teachers or youth group leaders or parents. And I think we’ve talked to a lot of people our age who have kids who are terrified to pass that along as well. And so I’m wondering — as you speak to parents, what are some of the biggest fears that they have in that department, of “I really don’t want to pass this along”? And how do you help them through that, or coach them through not passing it along, but also getting over that a little bit too and being able to be a confident parent as a Christian?
MILLER: I think one of the things that I found really helpful — that I always try to bring when we’re in a conversation together — is that there is no one right way that we’re supposed to be doing faith formation with children. And there’s actually a ton of research that went looking for one right way, really trying to find that thing — what’s the thing that if every kid has this experience, or their church culture is a certain way, or they learn a certain thing, what’s the thing that sort of locks them in for lifelong faith? And we didn’t find it. And so instead what we found were these themes of like having other adults outside your family who are also part of this tradition and you could talk to them and you see what they’re like and they like you. We found themes like family warmth — kids are more inclined to be open to the faith of their parents if they also like their parents. And so just investing in the things that keep you connected as a family, over whatever it is — if you all nerd out over Lord of the Rings, if you’re all huge Pokémon Go people or whatever. Those things that just create family fuzzies actually have a surprising faith support element to them. And then parents are often like, well, I can do that. I can do things with my kid that we like.
And then I think just being mindful that a lot of this is about offering kids presence and process way more than it is about offering them answers. In fact, young people who come from very rigid cultures of faith — where everything has an answer, all the adults have it on lock, and the kid is expected to simply memorize it and accept it — they tend to fare far worse in faith than kids who come from more flexible cultures that carry questions well, that are very comfortable with saying things like, I don’t know, or yeah, I’ve actually kind of had that same sort of doubt along the way. Especially if those cultures tell you like, yeah, I’ve wondered that for years, and I don’t know if it’s ever gonna have an answer, and here is how I work that through. Those actually serve kids really well.
And again, then you find parents going, oh, well, I can totally say I have no idea. And it’s like, actually you can. And that would be helpful — in a way, to be able to share that stuff — because it helps a young person understand that our faith is not actually built on fact over fact over fact just stacking on each other. It’s just more dynamic than that and more challenging than that. And that if a young person is experiencing challenge, that doesn’t mean they’re doing it wrong.
BEATY: As a final question: how has the faith of children — whether your own children, or children you’ve taught or interacted with in a church or ministry context — how has their faith shaped your own faith? I think we tend to assume it’s only one directional, but of course it’s dynamic, as you said.
MILLER: I think that children can help us — and have helped me — with the part of faith where I’m like, it’s kind of just deciding what I make of this Jesus guy. Kids, because of their world being rooted in core relationships to important adults, to their friends — the personal friendship side of, I’m trying to get to know a person named Jesus and decide if I like the guy — it’s a very helpful question. And there are a lot of other pieces to faith that matter. But we’re really bad at the conversation around essentials and non-essentials. And kids are pretty good at just being kind of curious about Jesus. They never cease to come to Jesus and recognize when he’s being really weird or really funny, because they don’t experience Jesus as this mythical figure. They’re trying to figure out if it’s someone they want to be friends with, in a way. And I found that very helpful. I like that very much about being in conversations with kids about faith and the Bible.
STONE: Well, thank you so much for joining us today.
BEATY: Yes, thanks, Meredith.
MILLER: Oh, thank you for having me. I’m incredibly grateful. This was a great conversation.
BEATY: And congratulations on your new book.
MILLER: Thank you.
STONE: Do you think putting on a hair suit was like the Old Testament way of looksmaxxing?
BEATY: You know, I think it was Jacob’s way of birthright-maxxing and blessing-maxxing. I feel bad for Esau. He got doubly hoodwinked by his own brother.
STONE: I think he ascends at the end, though.
BEATY: He’s described as like the reddest man in the Bible. He was very red, apparently. Maybe he was overexfoliating.
STONE: No doubt. Yeah. Overexfoliating on his hunting trips.
BEATY: He needs to get one of those IPL light treatments.
STONE: Or a — isn’t it like a BBL laser?
BEATY: Okay, but whenever I hear BBL —
STONE: You just think Brazilian butt lift. What if Esau got a Brazilian butt lift?
BEATY: You know, after being hoodwinked out of his blessing and birthright, maybe he was just like, I’m just gonna lean into my naturally good looks and looksmax. Enhance my natural features.
STONE: Saved by the City is a Religion News Service production. The producer is Jonathan Woodward and the consulting editor is Paul O’Donnell. Our editor is Megan Saliashvili.
BEATY: Chaz Russo put together our look and Martin Fowler wrote our theme music.
STONE: We are Roxy Stone and Katelyn Beaty.
BEATY: Thanks for listening.
