Beginning with an overarching summary story (prior to the creation account), the author of The Jesus Storybook Bible, Sally Lloyd-Jones (no relation to the late Martyn Lloyd-Jones, as far as I know), starts with “The Story and the Song.” This first story cites a paraphrase of Psalm 19:1-2, and then reads as follows: In fact, my own objections began in the very first story. The problems with this storybook Bible are numerous. In short, I was in a very small minority. After all, when a book becomes a bestseller (over 2 million now), you can pretty well guarantee that a large portion of those sales are made to well-intentioned but misguided parents who are wiling to overlook error in the name of sentimentality. As you can imagine, though, when I publicly expressed the problems with The Jesus Storybook Bible, I quickly became the object of parental rancor.
Once I put this book in the circular file next to my garage (along with a few other bunkmates, like The Message Bible), I wanted to make sure to warn others, as genuine love for my fellow man would have me do. Nevertheless, we jumped into the book, only to jump right back out. The latter types of churches use this catchword to represent the supposed relationship they have with the Holy Spirit (wrongly believing that God “whispers,” “prompts,” and “nudges” believers in their everyday lives as they make decisions). The former types of churches use this catchword because of its hyper-relational appeal (after all, “whispering” presupposes non-confrontational intimacy-prized by the Emergent Church and its dogmatic emphasis on “community”). After all, the keyword “whisper” stood out like a sore thumb to me, representing the kind of language prevalent in both the Emergent Church movement and Charismatic churches. With a tagline that reads, “Every story whispers his name,” I should have acted on my suspicions and reviewed it more thoroughly. To be honest, I should have judged the book by its cover, enough so that I would never have started reading it in the first place.
That’s because I explained that this book was not just “not good,” but actually “really bad.” But, when I broke the news to him, he took it very well. Yet, from the very first day that I began reading to my son, I knew we wouldn’t be revisiting it. Hearing that this product had a particular emphasis on Christ in all of Scripture was, of course, an appealing feature to me as I sought to guard against the kind of moralistic instruction that often masquerades as Christian discipleship. At that time, my older son and I had worked our way through several other children’s storybook Bibles, and I was excited for this to be the next step in preparing him for verse-by-verse exposition in a full-text Bible.
Although it was first published in 2007, it wasn’t until around 2015 that I was first introduced to The Jesus Storybook Bible as an option for my kids.
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