How to Teach Biblical Narratives in Youth Ministry

This month’s series is focusing on how to teach the different genres of Scripture to youth. We all know there’s a big difference between a Ezekiel and Psalms, but how should that effect the way we study and teach those portions of God’s Word in our ministry? Subscribe to the blog to get forthcoming articles in this series.

Jesus was a storyteller, and He was great at it. But many times, youth leaders aren’t, not because they aren’t capable, but because they don’t see the importance of it IN their teaching. But your student’s hearts are hard-wired to both love and need a compelling story. Their psychological and spiritual need for both the coherence and transcendence that a story’s plot gives them provides you an amazing advantage as a preacher, to win their attention and to move their affections towards our storytelling God. As you approach the pulpit, or the table, or the circle of well-past-their-prime couches, remember these principles when teaching narrative passages in Scripture. 

The First Time You Preach is When You Read the Text Aloud

If your reading of narratives sounds the exact same as your reading of epistles, or the Law, or poetry, you’re reading narratives wrong. Narratives are built to be remembered from oral tradition. They include a specific pace, plot, and memorable lines from broadly sketched characters. If your snooty Pharisee has the same voice and pace as the deeply shamed tax collector, your students will flatten out the text where there should be pitch, movement ,and tonal shifts. 

Reading the whole book to try to figure out each character’s perspective and unique voice in the story is of tremendous benefit. If your Judas and Peter, your Mary and Martha, or even your Mary and Joseph all sound the same, your kids will blend together characters in a way the text never intended. If Jesus speaks to the paralytic and Pilate with the same tone, you’ve taken an actual person and turned them into a sort of “beige” historical figure. To avoid this, read stories from the Scriptures like stories. This sounds almost too easy to apply, but there are too many sermons or lessons that would be better served with simply a focused, lively reading of the text. If you model to your students a reading of the text that does justice to the pace of the story and the voice of each character, you can expect that their devotional readings will follow suit.

If the Story has a Plot, Follow the Plot

Let’s say you’re dealing with the dramatic death of Jezebel, or Herod being consumed by worms, or even the Resurrection account. Do yourself a favor and don’t read the entire text first. That’s like watching The Return of the King or Avengers: Endgame, and as soon as the movie ends, you go back to the beginning and slowly explain the fine points of the film in order. Many narratives are meant to build dramatic tension. If you instinctively spoil the ending because it has been modeled to you that every teaching must begin with a full reading of the text, remove that model from your mindset. Picture beginning the book of Esther with the phrase “don’t worry, Haman dies ironically, and everyone is okay.” We wouldn’t think of doing such a thing with our own stories, so don’t do it with Scripture. 

Don’t Out Story the Story 

Some passages are intimidating. Some of the epistles, minor prophets or wisdom books might require a little introductory story from your own life to soften the difficulty of a tough text. But narratives usually require little in the way of introduction outside of connecting them to previous stories in your series. The stories in the Bible are good stories! So if you find yourself beginning a narrative message each week with your own wild stories to try to draw the attention of your listeners, make sure that you aren’t “out-storying the story.” Students learning David and Goliath or the death of Absalom probably don’t need your anecdote about the airport. If you want to build dramatic tension, let the story do the storytelling and avoid adding too many of your own experiences into the message. 

Be Ready for the Know-It-Alls 

Youth who have spent their entire life in church will often approach narratives with a smugness that other genres tend to avoid. If you begin with Daniel and the Lion’s Den, or Jesus feeding the 5,000, you’ll almost inevitably hear one of your kids chime in with “I know this story.” Instead of bristling and getting thrown off, make sure that you include details from the narrative that they wouldn’t have heard in 3rd grade Sunday School. They may know about Daniel surviving the lions, but they may not have gone into detail about how the conspirators against Daniel, their wives, and children were cast into the lion's den and had their bones broken in pieces before they even hit the floor (Dan. 6:26). They may have heard about the Golden Calf, but not the bloody march through the camp that followed it (Ex. 32:25-29).  

Also, be ready to build connections that students may not know to other places in Scripture, especially the Gospel. By anticipating the idea that narratives will bring out your badge-covered sword-drill all-stars, you can make sure to have something ready for them that they aren’t expecting. Anticipating these objections, however well-meaning they might be, lets you move your students from basic trivia to deeper meaning, from disconnected stories to an overlapping universe within the biblical text. 

Cute Story, Where’s Jesus

Narratives can often unintentionally lead to teaching pitfalls like legalism, antinomianism, moralism, or self-projection. If your story about lawbreakers ends with a shame-based plea against lawlessness for the sake of retaining the love of God, you’ve become legalistic. If this same story ends with a quick, punchy reminder that Jesus still loves lawbreakers and so everything is fine, you’ve become antinomian. If your message ends with “this is why you don’t break the law,” you’ve taken a narrative and turned it into one of Aesop’s fables. If your story ends with multiple stories about your own lawbreaking that are so specific to your own life that students can’t make the connections to the gospel from their personal experience, then you’ve taken a story pointing to Christ and shifted the arrow to yourself. To avoid these pitfalls, assess your prepared narrative message with the phrase “cute story, where’s Jesus?” 

Don’t let yourself jump ahead of the narrative right to a gospel application. Conversely, if there are no traces of the gospel in your narrative sermons, then you aren’t giving the whole story its due. Show how goodness in the characters points to the goodness of Jesus, or the absence of goodness that demonstrates why we need a Savior. As your students start to see each week connecting to the gospel story, they’ll start to emulate it in their own readings of Scripture. Highlighting the person and work of Christ from each biblical text will help draw students into understanding the beauty of the connectedness of Scripture, how redemption drips from all its pages. 

A Closing Encouragement

Don’t be afraid of narratives! There are great stories to tell within the Bible, wondrous accounts that draw kids closer to Jesus week by week. You’ll know that your own effectiveness is growing in the teaching of narratives when students move from saying “good sermon” to “great story” or “I never thought of it that way before.” Creativity and storytelling are both communicable attributes from our speaking and storytelling creator. So utilize biblical narratives in the hopes that your students will finally begin to see God’s story as the one that makes sense of the seemingly chaotic lives they live and calls them beyond it in hope.