The Story Bible That Taught Me How To Teach Kids

In early summer 2026, I finally found it. If my research is right, only 27 U.S. libraries have first editions of Catherine F. Vos’s Child’s Story Bible. But one of those sets resides at Asbury Theological Seminary—just 76 miles away from my home in Louisville.

I have three other editions of Vos’s story Bible on my office bookshelf, but they’re all significant edits of the original. So on a stormy Thursday, I drove east along I-64 then down winding, horse-country roads to the little town of Wilmore, Kentucky. I parked in the seminary’s front lot, walked through the rain under a stately statue of John Wesley, then climbed the library’s steps. Among the stacks, I finally held this three-volume story Bible written more than a decade before the Dead Sea Scrolls’ discovery.

Why did I want to see the original? Why go to this trouble? Because so much of what I know about teaching children came from reading Vos.

Catherine Vos and Her Story Bible

Catherine Frances Smith was born in Illinois in 1865. She was raised as a Congregationalist but married the Presbyterian scholar Geerhardus Vos in 1894, two years after he’d become the first professor of biblical theology at Princeton Seminary. Geerhardus and Catherine were married 43 years, and they had three sons and a daughter.

Why did I want to see the original? Why go to this trouble? Because so much of what I know about teaching children came from reading Vos.

Catherine Vos finished writing the Child’s Story Bible in 1935, two years before her death in 1937. The three volumes she produced were a lifelong project that began “when [her children] grew old enough to want to read the Bible stories for [themselves].” Vos first searched bookstores for a storybook Bible “which would be both faithful to the inspired Word of God and successful in conveying the dramatic excitement and human warmth of these most wonderful of stories.” When she couldn’t find one that suited her, she determined to write what she was looking for herself.

The original volumes published between 1934 and 1936 include a foreword from the board of the National Union of Christian Schools. The National Union partnered with Vos to create a story Bible suitable for use in Christian school classrooms.

The foreword notes that the first volume of Old Testament stories was evaluated by the education faculty at Calvin College and tested with children in a classroom setting. The faculty reviewers suggested the volume was on the reading level of children ages 7 to 12, but the foreword states, “Though especially suitable for children of that age, this book may be read with pleasure and profit by every member of the family. It is a book for every age—from seven to seventy.”

What Vos Taught Me

The National Union’s board said, “[We were] impressed by the fact that the author has thrown her whole soul, her whole personality, into the work. It was clearly a labor of love on her part and was inspired by a love for the kingdom of God.” When I first read the 1977 edition to my own children, I was impressed too.

Four features stand out that I often mimick when teaching God’s Word to elementary-age kids.

1. Vos lets the Bible’s text do the work.

The Child’s Story Bible covers Scripture’s story as comprehensively as a story Bible can. The original volumes include 193 chapters, and many of the Old Testament chapters are divided into multiple episodes. Some newer story Bibles get inventive with their story structures, but Vos follows Scripture’s narrative flow. She even lifts her dialogue directly from the King James translation. As a result, kids who learn these stories learn the Bible’s text itself.

2. She engages children directly, often with questions.

The first line of Vos’s story Bible in its original edition is this: “My dear child, how old are you?” If you’ve ever read a story to a group of children, you know how they respond to questions like this. No matter how rhetorical the questions may seem in print, children will answer them out loud.

By including questions throughout her stories, Vos keeps kids engaged and thinking along with what she’s teaching. In that first chapter, she conveys that no matter how many birthdays someone has had, God is older still: “God has always been alive. Forever and ever and ever, God has lived. . . . God is eternal.”

In her second chapter, Vos takes a different tack. Instead of beginning with a question, she assigns kids homework right as the story begins. After quoting Genesis 1:1, she writes, “This is the very first verse in the Bible. I want you to say it over to yourself until you know it.” What a model teacher! Her goal isn’t kids who passively listen; she wants engaged learners.

3. She defines her terms.

Vos knows kids build their vocabulary during story time, so whenever she comes across a Bible word or concept that’s unfamiliar to children, she dedicates a line or paragraph to defining it.

When one of these words is a theological term, she regularly borrows language from Presbyterian elder Joseph P. Engles’s Catechism for Young Children (1840), an introductory set of questions and answers Engles designed to introduce young children to the Shorter Catechism. Vos never quotes Engles’s catechism directly, but if you know its memorable turns of phrase, you won’t miss them as you read.

4. Vos has an eye for redemptive themes, especially promise and fulfillment.

It’s probably not surprising that the wife of a scholar of redemptive history would include biblical-theolgoical themes throughout her book. But you can’t travel far in this story Bible without tripping over a reference to God’s promises and how they’re fulfilled in Jesus.

It’s clear that Vos loves God’s promises. Writing about Jacob at Bethel, she records the Lord’s words: “I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised.” Then she comments,

Do you think that Jacob was lonely and unhappy now? No, indeed, he was most happy. . . . Jacob had found a friend in God, and no one is unhappy who has God for his friend.

‘Truths We Hold Dear’

If you pick up one of those 27 first editions (or even Banner of Truth’s lightly revised edition from 2021), you may be tripped up by some of Vos’s language. Much of her terminology, particularly terms for ethnicities and nationalities, is dated. Vos’s daughter, Marianne Catherine Vos Radius, did an excellent job updating such language in her 1977 revision. (Vos Radius also incorporated “the many archaeological discoveries of the past thirty years which have corroborated and confirmed the Biblical account.”)

By including questions throughout her stories, Vos keeps kids engaged and thinking along with what she’s teaching.

Others will notice—whatever edition you pick up—that Vos sometimes psychologizes the people in the biblical narratives, fancifully exploring more than the text says about what they “must have been” thinking and feeling.

Yet despite these minor drawbacks, Vos sets the standard for children’s Bible storybooks. When her story Bible was first published, the National Union board lauded her writing as “soundly Biblical and distinctive, in the sense that certain truths which we [Reformed Christians] hold dear are boldly and clearly presented.” Vos consistently makes the gospel clear in language kids can understand. All who teach children should emulate her boldness and clarity.