Author Interview with Meredith Miller- Wonder: 52 Conversations To Help Kids Fall In Love With Scripture
Photo by Samanta Sophia on Unsplash
By Emmy Kegler and Meredith Miller
Meredith Miller is a mom, pastor, and author with decades of focus on kids and family ministry. Her first book, Woven: Nurturing a Faith Your Kid Doesn't Have to Heal From, was published in 2023. Her second book, Wonder: 52 Conversations To Help Kids Fall In Love With Scripture, released this March. Church Anew blog editor Emmy Kegler sat down with Miller to chat about her life, work, and hopes for kids and faith.
Let's start with the bio: You're a mom, a writer, and a co-pastor of a church that primarily meets on Zoom and over dinner once a month. You have decades of experience focusing on kids and family ministry. What got you into family ministry?
I fell into it by way of a church that cared a ton about kids. It got major budget support, it was part of our main values. So by high school I helped with kids, and in college a team of us ran a summer calendar of family events. (My favorite of them were all-family surf lessons.) I happened to head to seminary straight from undergrad, and Fuller wasn’t far from my hometown. So I worked in family ministries while I studied.
What’s funny to me is that I stepped away from the role my final year to try some other things, because I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed into kids. That was how I found my way to Fuller Youth Institute, who were in the earlier stages of what became the Sticky Faith project. And that research is what’s kept me in this field ever since.
Wonder is my offering from the belief that we can help kids get to know God in good ways, right from the jump. Their faith will still change, their understanding of the Bible will evolve, but we can help them learn the Bible now in ways they won’t have to unlearn later.
What's exciting specifically about talking with kids about the Bible?
More than anything, it’s that kids don’t have the same notions about what the Bible is or how it works that adults have. If adults welcome kids’ thoughts and insights, if we want to hear their questions and reactions, we will find ourselves having totally different (and better) conversations about the Bible. They will find humor in the stories, for instance, or they’ll name the doubts and skepticism people may have felt in the moment.
Your first book was Woven: Nurturing a Faith Your Kid Doesn't Have to Heal From. After so long working in family ministry, what made Woven the book you needed to write first?
Woven had to come first because we have to talk about both the research we haven’t responded to (the collective Christian “we adults”, I guess) and the theology of the entire obedience training paradigm. When the research first came out, I truly thought we would see a massive shift in how we raised kids in faith. It didn’t happen, and in fact the conservative voices got louder. They’re hollering about obedience in a way that doesn’t match the Bible, or how God does things. They were, in the words of the late, beloved, Vin Scully, “loud wrong.”
So I wanted to write something that could invite adults into this shared conversation about how kids get to know Jesus—what are we trying to do? What’s the goal? From there, specific way a family shapes this is really flexible. But the dominant paradigm that assumes we’re just trying to raise good kids is not just neutral, it’s harmful, and we’re due for some major shifts.
Now you've got Wonder coming out, with the subtitle 52 Conversations To Help Kids Fall In Love With Scripture. What's the throughline from Woven to Wonder -- how did response to your first book help shape the second?
In Woven I advocate for a few key pillars when it comes to faith content—the Bible, doctrine and the like—including exploring the Bible and responding to it, rather than teaching it to kids and telling them how to apply it; and God-centered storytelling, where adults help kids notice what God’s like. These are things that can help us avoid moralistic interpretations that basically tell a kid God cares most about how they behave.
Those ideas resonated strongly with people, who promptly asked what kids’ Bible to get that would take this approach. While there are some out there, in what might be a lapse of judgment, I opted to start making something to help.
I paraphrased stories in the way I thought was both true to the text and accessible to kids. Then I thought: yeah, but what about the stuff in the real Bible that I left out? What if a parent or kid know those parts and have questions or want to go deeper? So I made a 2-sided sheet of commentary notes for the story too. At first, these went out one-story per week on Substack, but as time went on, it became clear that compiling them into a book could serve families better.
Wonder is my offering from the belief that we can help kids get to know God in good ways, right from the jump. Their faith will still change, their understanding of the Bible will evolve, but we can help them learn the Bible now in ways they won’t have to unlearn later.
What Bible story do you enjoy exploring with kids and their families but didn't make the final Wonder cut?
There are so many—Deborah is wonderful, but the narrator doesn’t give us much to turn into a story. I love Abigail, but chose not to give David too many stories. But maybe most of all I’d have loved to include Esther. For one, I think exile stories connect to the ways kids wonder if God will really be who God promises in very hard circumstances. But in a totally different vein, Esther’s funny. And it’s got these great literary features, like the character types--Namaan the buffoon villain, the dopey, ego-centric king, wise-advisor Mordeccai, and through it all discerning, clever Esther, navigating a very difficult set of problems, using her God-given wits and resources to bring life. The storytelling is clever, and God’s not an overt character, and yet we’re invited to see how people can do things that match God’s hopes in their own setting. It’s just so fun.
Pre-order your copy of Wonder: 52 Conversations To Help Kids Fall in Love With Scripture, out this March.
