Archbishop Desmond Tutu: Children of God Storybook Bible
London: Collins, 2010
This is a beautifully presented book, with high quality art from around the world to illustrate the stories. I really like the way the different artists paint in such varied styles, portraying a variety of peoples, so that this really is a book for children all over the world.
Archbishop Tutu has greatly simplified the stories, condensing them into half a dozen paragraphs. But the essence, the core message of the story is always skilfully communicated.
I picked up the book and read it from start to finish, and the compilation reads well as a whole; it picks up the major threads of the biblical texts as well as gently raising from obscurity some of the less frequently told and less well known stories. The story of Esther is there, for instance, which appears in the lectionary just once over the three year cycle, as is one from the book of Revelation, which is often avoided because of its complexities.
This book portrays the breadth of the Biblical stories, and the breadth of the audience for this foundational Sacred Text, in its choice of stories, in the telling of stories of women and children as well as the men, and in the stunning artwork.
And though it’s not tied to the lectionary, I have been able to use it in gathered worship with the children of my congregation on a couple of occasions. To be honest, I found the stories a little short for that purpose, though the artwork is a wonderful aid to the telling, and the prayer at the end of each story is a helpful way to finish.
I particularly like the way that, in the New Testament stories, Archbishop Tutu refers to the Kingdom of God as God’s dream. I found this to be, for adults and children, a very invitational, accessible way of naming what God is offering through Jesus – it grabs your imagination and invites you, too, to dream.
Speaking of language, I am a little disappointed that God is still referred to with the masculine pronoun – though it isn’t dominant, and ‘God’ is used more often than ‘He’. For a book that otherwise breaks down some of the barriers to inclusivity into God’s dream through language and image, I would have liked to see this one gone, too.
This is a tiny criticism of a book about which there is nothing else not to like – this is a beautiful gift for a child, a congregation, for ourselves.
