GBBW: 2024 Roundup!
links to all 45 stories and what's up next
Well hello and Happy New Year!
It’s almost time to kick off the the Great Big Bible Story Walkthrough 2025, which also means we’re doing a 2024 GBBW round up. I’ve got all the links to all the stories, a preview of 2025, and a quick overview of what all this is, in case you’re new!
And if you don’t have time for all that, scroll until you see the banner ‘one last important thing’. Because it is.
The Great Big Bible Story Walkthrough is a tool to help you talk with your kids about the Bible.
Each week we do one paraphrased Bible story and there are ideas for you to wonder, play and pray your way through it. How you use those ideas is totally up to you.
You might only tell the story. You might start with the game first. You might listen to the story on the Ask Away podcast and then just ask one ‘wonder question’.
This is like a menu, not a manuscript.
And perhaps my favorite thing on the menu? Insights to important parts of the passage on the commentary and context page. The headings help you hop around topically there too.
These can help you answer questions, offer fun facts, or simply revisit these stories yourself.
Some folks here are simply reading the paraphrase and commentary page for themselves personally. This is a walkthrough of the stories they heard as kids to hear them in a fresh way.
Currently, the GBBW is a collection of 45 Bible stories - 20 from the Old Testament and 25 from the New Testament.
Members of the Kids + Faith Community have access the full archive of stories, no matter when they joined in.
Since that’s a lot of stories, I wanted to round ‘em up here into one big list of links to help! So here are the 45 stories of 2024:
The Pentateuch Pack
Life in the Land
Jesus Stories
The Church Carries On
Christmas
Shepherds hear the news
Wise men visit Jesus
Starting next week through Easter, we are returning to even more Jesus stories, because they are a great place to go after Christmas. (Jesus is born, and now, let’s talk about his life more!)
John the Baptist announces the coming of the kingdom of God
Jesus is baptized
Jesus tempted in the wilderness
Jesus’ kingdom parables
Jesus calls Matthew
Jesus heals on Sabbath
Jesus flips the tables at the Temple
Jesus is anointed by the woman at dinner
Jesus calms the storm
Jesus talks about the least and greatest
And then it will be Easter time, and we’ll do a collection of stories for that, continue on from the resurrection with 10 stories from the New Testament, and then circle back to 20 stories from the Old Testament.
Kids under 5? We’ll get you a New Testament preschool pack and have the Easter stories ready for their age.
Have thoughts or questions about all this? Whatever they are, I’d love to try and help. Drop them in the comments!
There’s not ‘one right way’ to explore the Bible with kids. Whether your family has a structured time for talking about the Bible, or a super informal approach where it just comes up a long the way, I hope the GBBW can help you feel more equipped to lean in.
Please remember, the goal is not to give your kids a bunch of Bible information. We’re all done with sword drills and rote memorization. We’re done treating stories like sources of trivia—Name the dimensions of the tabernacle. How many pounds of food does it take to feed 5,000 people?
Our goal here is to explore the Bible, and help kids do the same, looking at it with curiosity and wonder, so that it can be part of how we get to know God more and more over time.
Great Big Bible Story Walkthrough 2025! Let’s do this!
-Meredith
May our God bless you in the year ahead with wisdom about what’s best for the unique kids in your life, peace as you make those choices as best you can, and courage to follow God in the beautifully ordinary ways that fit your real life.
Amen.
I so appreciate your work which is approachable, accessible and adaptable! I'd love to hear how you would suggest tackling the whole concept of Jesus' death as sacrifice around Easter and the church carrying on as this language is in the epistles and in the songs sung in church - kids pick it up but don't have a framework to fit it into. Any help there would be great!
So helpful Meredith, thank you. We're going to try and work through this as a family this year, one story per week. We've got 9/11/12 year olds so going to encourage the kiddos to read the relevant scripture in the week prior, then we get to chat about it as a family on Sunday. I wonder, for this purpose, how easily you could add the relevant scripture passages to the list above of the stories? Perhaps helpful for others too...
And any advice/input on kids reading scripture on their own with this purpose...maybe some questions to keep in mind as they read? What do you notice? What's confusing?...