Growing in God’s love together

LOUISVILLE — Jessica Miller Kelley, a senior acquisitions editor at Westminster John Knox Press and the editor of the new book “Growing in God’s Love: A Family Devotional,” told the hosts of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” last week that when families read the Bible together, they must balance honesty with appropriateness.

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“There are so many stories in Scripture that are violent or scary or may imply things about God that we don’t want our kids to believe,” she told Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe during a 57-minute conversation that can be heard here. “The answer to the problem is not to avoid the texts altogether, but to be honest about who wrote the Bible and why, so that we’re teaching kids the Bible was written by people who loved and followed God and were trying to make sense of the world, like we do.”

For example: in exploring the Genesis account of The Great Flood, parents can teach their children that people don’t understand why natural disasters happen. “Like today, they didn’t know why some people lost everything and others didn’t,” Kelley said. “A story saying why one man’s family survived because he was a really good man helped people make sense of things back then.”

“We don’t want our kids to be thinking they just need to be really good and nothing bad will ever happen to them,” she said. “But we do want them to know life can feel really scary and out of control, and that God’s with them no matter what.”

Doong recalled going home as a child after Sunday school and church. His mother would ask him what he thought of the sermon or what he’d learned from the gospel lesson.

“I think that fostered a curiosity, that it was OK to ask these questions,” he said. “There’s not necessarily a wrong question or answer. There’s just a conversation about it.”

“Kids have such creative insights about faith and about life. The more conversations we can spark about important issues, the better it is for everybody,” Kelley said. Whether a question elicits “a Sunday school answer or not, just wrestling with Scripture, with faith and with each other,” can help families to grow closer.

“The beautiful thing about Scripture is it took a community to write it and it took a community to figure out what books were going to be in there,” Catoe said. “I think we miss that communal way of reading Scripture.”

Highlighting stories that are sometimes overlooked “can be a fun way, especially with kids but adults too, to show how interesting Scripture is,” Kelley said. “It can tell us what people were like then and how we can wrestle with God today, too.”

Reading the Bible together “can be scary,” she said. “What if your kid says something you find theologically abhorrent?” But learning about, say, Thomas and his doubts can teach children that “doubt isn’t the absence of trust or faith in God or Scripture or any of that, but an expression of care, that you care enough to wrestle with it.”

The ”fun thing” about a resource for people of all ages is “you’re theoretically teaching kids, but the adult is learning right alongside the kids, and it becomes accessible for everyone,” she said. Children and grownups both learn from the act of storytelling: “how would you tell the story of our family’s origin, our family’s history in faith?” Kelley said. “It wouldn’t sound like Abraham and Sarah, but it would have a similar purpose of showing us who we are and learning from our past.”

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When we imagine Scripture coming from those kinds of questions, “it seems a little less magical,” she said. “It’s not a golden book falling from the sky, but it becomes more relatable and understandable as part of human history — how we’re all trying to make sense of the world and connect with God and to see how our life experiences connect to God.”

Every devotion has response options, including discuss, discover and do. Children can act out a story, then talk about the experience, Kelley said. “We tend to see ourselves as the hero in the story, the same as those who wrote the Bible,” she said. “Today especially we need to think about not being the hero and what that means about what we can take from these stories. Hopefully the invitation to play with Scripture can invite some of those insights.”

Kelley and her husband hold a Maundy Thursday service in their house. One time their youngest child “just started doing a liturgical dance on her own. That’s how she felt moved to respond to the moment, to dance as she’d never done before,” Kelley said. “Somehow that spiritual experience we were having inspired that in her.”

The book, published on Tuesday, is part of what Kelley called “a trusted brand that Westminster John Knox Press has, the ‘Growing in God’s Love’ line.”

“It’s theology you don’t have to un-teach later. It’s inclusive, and being a story Bible, it’s illustrated, and the illustrations show Jesus more authentically with folk in the brown skin tones that they would have had, and not give erroneous ideas about the Bible.”

“I believe it’s really important to pass on our values to our kids, and those can be rooted in Scripture,” Kelley said. “It’s a shared library we’re all drawing from.”

“Growing in God’s Love: A Family Devotional” is published in collaboration with Around the Table, an initiative of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).