Preliminary Comments on "Telling God's Story"

Before actually starting on the content of Peter Enns' book, Telling God's Story, I want to give my own short comments on it.

As I alluded to in my previous post, the main reason I'm interested in going through this book is that our children are growing up in a very different world than my generation of evangelicals did. We had no access to the worldwide internet; all that we were taught about the Bible (some true and some not so true) was more easily adhered to as we grew up because we were more confined to the small cultural Christian world we knew. Today as children grow and are exposed either to college friends or people in the workplace or simply to their own exploration on the internet, they discover many other ways of thinking. If the child is particularly an inquisitive sort, he/she will begin to ask his own questions and have doubts about what he's been taught at home.

If those of us who are raising today's children can get a better grasp of what God's purpose in giving us His Word is and at the same time let go of things that we have perhaps dogmatically believed about the Bible for the sake of better seeing the big story, then I believe our children will be much better prepared to face the questions and doubts that they will encounter eventually. Those who study trends in the church show that many young people are leaving the faith when they leave home because they encounter legitimate questions about God and the Bible, and without proper understanding of what the Bible is (and is not), they start to have their own doubts and end up abandoning the Christian faith altogether.

I believe Peter Enns does a good job of laying some groundwork on this in this small book. He is a highly trained scholar who has grappled with many questions related to scripture in both university and seminary classrooms. He has three children and they are the motivation for having distilled some of what he has learned into this simple form.

I'll be covering the book chapter by chapter - my objective is to present the author's material, not to critique it. This book is one of a few that Enns has published for teaching the Bible to children. For more information on the other books (and more that are coming), see http://olivebranchbooks.net/tgs.html. There is also more written about this curriculum and how it's being used at:  http://olivebranchbooks.wordpress.com/

I pray for the Spirit's help as we go through this book...