The Bible Story Handbook: A Resource for Teaching 175 Stories from the Bible

A few years ago myself and a former missionary met and discussed how many stories we thought people in the church know. I said "three" and he said, "two". Then I thought how sad it is that children are often taught stories in the Bible and what they retain is the stories they were told but as adults the number is almost zero. Should we be surprised that in the church is a crisis. People tend to know more doctrine than the stories in the Bible. The last time I heard a sermon Genesis was when I preached it.I asked another pastor about when the last time he heard a sermon preached on Genesis. For him it was a sermon he preached. The point is that many know some doctrine but not the stories. They know the parts of an elephant but not the elephant. Telling stories keeps one humble and it involves people of all ages. There was a time when a father and daughter told a story. His daughter was six at the time. The people who were listening and participated ranged from six to eighty. Everyone participated in the discussion and application of the story. The book the Walton's have written is excellent.

The Bible Story Handbook is a collection of lessons on 175 segments of the Bible with information to understand and teach them. This book was written as a resource for those who teach or lead children and youth ministries and Sunday School classes. The purpose is to educate the leader how to understand the passages so he can teach it to others. Our family, which includes university age children, used the book for family devotions / Bible study a couple of times per week.The book starts with an introduction and overview. Then it has 175 short chapters (usually about 2 pages long) that correspond to various Bible passages. Each of the chapters contains:• A title and Bible passage reference,• Lesson focus,• Lesson application,• Biblical context,• Interpretational issues in the story,• Background information, and• Mistakes to avoid.Our family started with prayer, took turns reading the Bible passage and each of the parts in the lesson, discussed the lesson to some extent, and closed in prayer.While this is designed for teaching kids of all ages, this is not a book of kids’ activities, coloring pages, or games but is a teaching resource. I especially appreciated the reminder to focus on the purpose and meaning of each passage and to not pluck from the passages peripheral points or use it to teach what it was not actually communicating. From page 17, “A text cannot mean what it never meant. Or to put that in a positive way, the true meaning of the biblical text for us is what God originally intended it to mean when it was first spoken. We can only attach authority to a lesson that the text is intentionally teaching; the reader must look to the text to determine what that teaching is.”According to the Waltons, there 5 common mistakes made in teaching Bible passages. They are:1. Promotion of the trivial,2. Illegitimate extrapolation,3. Reading between the lines,4. Missing important nuance, and5. Focus on people rather than God.I love how this book helped us avoid these fallacies and center our learning on the God, the primary meaning in the story, and the big picture across the whole of scripture. I think we are all better Bible readers now and can apply this approach to our study of scripture going forward. I highly recommend this book for families and churches as a resource not only to teach the Bible but to teach how to read passages and understand their central message. In this day of biblical illiteracy, we want our children to be proficient in studying and understanding the Bible, know how to find the key message of a passage, and avoid common interpretational faux pas. This is an excellent book for that purpose and I endorse it wholeheartedly.

This is a guiding light for teaching Bible stories to preschoolers. It has corrected many of my misinterpretations and wrong applications. I had the opportunity to meet Kim and John—both brilliant and humble. We are using this resource as a guide for quality discussion about key Bible stories with our teenager. Every Christian home needs to own this book.

This book is fantastic. It is by far the best kids Bible Story book for teachers I've ever seen. This is better than many commentaries - especially in the Old Testament. It covers 7 areas on each story and takes up about 1-3 pages per story - focus, theme, application, place in the Bible, interpretational issues, historical and cultural background, and age-group appropriateness.It lists the teaching points and also the application points. Everything comes from the text (that's how Dr. Walton rolls). Dr. Walton does an amazing job of letting the text guide us to what the story is about. In the last section he tells you what not to teach. Ironically - what not to teach is actually what many Sunday School and VBS curriculum teach.What he writes about the "place in the Bible" of the story is powerful and though simple, helps you keep in mind where the story is going and how this fits into the bigger picture.I can't say enough good things about this book. There is nothing like it out there. Again - it's more helpful and better than many commentaries.

I am the Children's Minister at my church. We have struggled to find children's curriculum to use in Elementary Sunday School. We have not found a single curriculum that I am pleased with and willing to give to our teachers to use in teaching our children.After finding The Bible Story Handbook, I am pleased to say that we have found a fantastic resource. It is simple and the teachers have found it very helpful. It does require the teachers to come up with creative ways to teach the material, but the book provides very good and exegetically sound teaching for children.I have found a few lessons that I do not think are very good, but they are easy to skip and/or replace. And the format of the chapters makes it easy to create my own lessons. (For example, I have created my own lessons for holidays like Trinity Sunday, All Saints' Day, etc.)All in all, I highly recommend this book.

I like the author, and his decision to create this book is a God send 😉. This is NOT a book of Bible stories, but of HOW to teach your young about them..

Sometimes having grown up in sunday school, we may have been impressed with certain misreadings of the stories in the bible. This book helps to highlight and clarify many significant teachings from the various stories commonly taught. Highly recommended!

Great book for planning and teaching Sunday school.

Stories are a bit too simplified.