More Than Character: What Bible Stories Teach Us About God (Starr Meade)

In the new issue of Credo Magazine, “Let the Children Come to Jesus,” Starr Meade has contributed an article titled, “More Than Character: What Bible Stories Teach Us About God.” Starr Meade served for ten years as the Director of Children’s Ministries in a local church, overseeing ministry to children from infancy through the sixth grade. She wrote curriculum and family devotional materials while there. Next, Starr worked for eight years as a Christian school teacher, teaching Bible and beginning Latin classes. Currently, she teaches classes for home school students in her home and does as much writing as she can. Starr has a B.A. in Bible with an emphasis on Christian Education from Arizona College of the Bible. She and her husband, Paul, teach a children’s Sunday school class at Grace Covenant Church (Reformed Baptist) in Gilbert, Arizona.

Here is the start of here article:

“And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land,” you tell your students (Jonah 2:10). If your audience is made up of three-year-olds who are unfamiliar with this story, they breathe a collective sigh of relief that Jonah is okay after all. If your audience consists of fifth-graders, at least one of them is waving his raised hand in a desperate desire to insist that the fish could not have been a whale, no matter what the pictures indicate. You move on to the next part of the story, pointing out that now, when God again tells Jonah to go preach in Nineveh, Jonah goes. With the story over and attention spans just about used up, children begin to squirm, and you realize you have no more than ninety seconds left to get your application across. You urge them to consider that, though they will probably never be swallowed by a great fish, if they disobey God as Jonah did, they will be inviting certain misery. God has their best interests at heart, you remind them, and “there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus than to trust and obey.” Class ends and the children leave, hopefully heading off to be just a little more obedient than they would have been had they not attended Sunday school today.

What’s missing from this storytelling scenario? I maintain that the main character is missing. Jonah is not the main character of this story; God is. His activity, not Jonah’s, should be our focus.

God is the main character

In fact, God is the main character of every Bible story. The Bible tells the great story of God saving a people to be his people, in spite of all the obstacles and plot twists along the way. Each individual story we tell to children is an episode in that main story, an incident that moves the plot along and brings us closer to God’s keeping of the promises he began making in the Garden of Eden. What matters in every Bible story is what God does. The most important application of every one of the Bible’s stories is not how I can imitate (or avoid imitating) the human character; the most important application is what I should know and believe about the character of God. This becomes obvious when we consider the purpose of Scripture. Was God’s purpose in giving us his Word to hold up human examples of moral glory? Or was it to reveal himself to us, along with the salvation he provides?

Yet when we tell stories to children, we almost always focus on the human character. When we get to the end, we almost always offer an application for the story that involves doing (or not doing) what that character did. Why do we do this? For one thing, it’s what we’re used to. Both fairy tales and Aesop’s fables, standard fare in children’s literature, wind up with some version of “and the moral of the story is….” And when adults told us Bible stories, when we were children, the adults often drew those kinds of morals for us as well.

For another thing, making a moral point the main point is the easiest thing to do. In most Bible stories, we can see at first glance behaviors that can be quickly labeled either good or bad. Working out what the invisible God is up to may take a little more study. And finally, looking for good behavior to copy is our default setting as sinful humans, isn’t it? Don’t we always have to remind ourselves that we’re not supposed to be working our way into God’s favor? Don’t we always have to remind ourselves that the real story is what God does for us, not what we do for him? This is true even for those of us who know good and well that biblical Christianity is built on God saving sinners who can’t save themselves; we come to the end of a Bible story and automatically look around for what we should do. …

Read the rest of this article today in Credo Magazine!

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Ministry is complex. Business meetings, sermons, youth group, small groups, counseling sessions—the list is endless. In the midst of these many important ministries, sometimes churches can neglect one of the most important ministries of all. That’s right, children’s ministry. This is a dangerous thing to neglect. After all, the children filling our churches will carry on the torch long after we are gone. Therefore, whether or not they are being taught sound doctrine should never be underestimated.

But where does this teaching really begin? It begins in the home, when mom and dad take time out of their busy schedule to sit down with their little ones and tell them about Jesus and the great things he has done for our salvation. If you’re anything like me, this is much easier said than done. Home life can be just as busy as church life. Yet, could there be a more important 15 minutes in the day than when dad and mom read the Bible, sing songs, and pray with their children? I think not. Ironically, in my experience it’s not just my kids who are spiritually nurtured during this family worship time, it’s me too!

Having in mind the importance of teaching our children the core doctrines of the faith, this issue of Credo Magazine brings together some outstanding contributors to teach both parents and those in ministry alike how to better approach children so that they know God in a saving way. Perhaps the words of Jesus should hang as a banner over this issue of the magazine: “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:14).

Contributors include: Nancy Guthrie, Sally Michael, Simonetta Carr, Jason Helopoulos, Starr Meade, Jessalyn Hutto, Bobby Jamieson, and many others.