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“Once upon a time, we told stories.” Real stories. Stories wrapped in the glow of a crackling fire, where embers floated upward and disappeared into “the glorious expanse of God’s unfolding cosmos.” Those stories were full of dragons and heroes, serpents and knights, danger and beauty. People gasped, laughed, and shuddered. Stories shaped communities long before screens ever did. They lived on cave walls, papyrus sheets, a stump in the woods or a whispered rumor traveling from house to house “like the initial spark of a candlelight sunrise service.”
And so begins The Story We Tell Our Children, a new book by Matt Markins. In it, he asks us to think about these stories and how the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories our children hear — from parents, leaders, friends, media, etc. — shape what they believe and who they become.
After all, who hears every story with wide eyes and hearts filled with wonder and dreams? Our children do.
Matt explains that even long ago, children “crouched behind stone walls, craned their necks through hedges, or stood on apple crates to hear what the adults were “fussin’ about.” Children have always been eager listeners, absorbing “clues and cues”—the words we say, the tone we use, the stories we live. They “pick up what we put down,” and the little stories they hear grow into big stories.
How Stories Become Identity
One of these little stories that grew was told to Matt’s wife Katie. He tells us that the story she was told over and over as a child was this: “I’m not good enough.” It wasn’t taught to her outright, yet it shaped her sense of self for years.
That is how the catechistic rhythms of truth or lies form identity. When we hear the same story repeated again and again, we begin to believe it’s true even if it isn’t. Sometimes we intentionally pass on a story. More often, children absorb stories informally: overheard conversations, cultural messages, family patterns, trauma or simply the emotional climate and culture of our homes.
Research supports this. Barna famously observed: “What you believe by the time you are 13 is what you will die believing. A person’s worldview is primarily shaped and firmly in place by the age of 13.”
What does this mean? It means childhood stories shape us in profound ways. They paint our skies, fill our dreams and reorder our interior world. The stories we hear shape us with such force that they fuse with our identity and become the reality by which we see everything else. Someone once said, “If you can remember your childhood, you will never run out of things to write about.” Why is that? Because every story you tell as an adult comes from the story you believed as a child.
Childhood stories → shape worldview → which becomes identity.
And if those childhood stories are counterfeit, the identity that grows from them will be counterfeit too. Matt says:
“Simply stated, the stories children believe about themselves and the world around them can become so captivating that they can develop a deep affection for a counterfeit captor — someone or something that has no business having that kind of power over a young person. And yet, these counterfeit stories can sometimes hold them hostage for a lifetime.”
This isn’t poetic exaggeration; it’s a diagnosis.
Counterfeit Stories Make Counterfeit Disciples
I can almost hear you say, “But the Gospel! Doesn’t the Gospel rewrite every false story?” Yes!
The Gospel is the one true story that resets identity, restores dignity and heals the soul. But the painful reality is this: many children cling to counterfeit stories even when the Gospel is right in front of them. They adopt the very narratives that wound them. They grow to love the things that keep them captive. Our kids can hear the message of redemption and the restoration of all things, yet still be stuck believing the lie they have been conditioned to accept.
The Captor We Learn to Love
In The Story We Tell Our Children, Matt recounts the story of the 1973 Stockholm bank robbery, where hostages bonded with their captors and grew over time to love the very people who held them at gunpoint. After the robbery ended, the hostages who were now free continued to defend and protect their former captors, even refusing to press charges.
At the 2025 Child Discipleship Forum, Matt told the story of the Stockholm hostage crisis and explained how experts define and refer to Stockholm Syndrome:
“When facing danger, hostages interpret small acts of kindness as significant benevolence, forming emotional dependence on their captors.” What does that have to do with children and the stories shaping them? Everything.
Our kids are being held captive by counterfeit stories — and many have grown to love their captors.
The stories our kids are hearing in the culture we live in are these: “You are loved for what you do, not who you are. You are only as valuable as the number of likes or followers you get online. Identity is limitless, fluid and self-invented.”
These stories are forming identity earlier than ever, deeper than ever and quieter than ever. As parents and church leaders, we feel the weight of that. Because we know the truth: there is one story that frees rather than enslaves. But children will not drift into the truth by accident. They have to be told.
“It all begins with a story.”
Story will shape every child. This is the beauty and the power of the Christian faith. God could have sent us facts about Himself; He could have told us He existed using math and numbers, but He didn’t; He told us in a story — the true story of a God who made Himself small, who lived a perfect life, died in our place, rose again on the third day and ascended to heaven. In a world filled with lies, our kids long for truth and meaning. So, give them a story, a story so true that it alone can carry the weight of the joy and sorrow of human life.
In my 2023 Child Discipleship Forum keynote, I quoted pastor and author Eugene Peterson, who said:
“Somewhere along the way, most of us pick up bad habits of extracting from the Bible what we pretentiously call ‘spiritual principles,’ or ‘moral guidelines,’ or ‘theological truths,’ and then corseting ourselves in them in order to force a godly shape to our lives. That’s a mighty uncomfortable way to go about improving our condition. And it’s not the gospel way. Story is the gospel way. Story isn’t imposed on our lives; it invites us into its life. As we enter and imaginatively participate, we find ourselves in a more spacious, freer, and more coherent world…. Story is the primary means we have for learning what the world is, and what it means to be a human being in it.”
Story is the Gospel way. Our sin demanded God’s Perfection in Christ, which culminated in His Rescue. This is the Gospel. This is more than a theological reality; it’s a story of God’s redemptive love.
Matt ends the opening chapter of The Story We Tell Our Children with this profound insight:
“The reality our children find themselves in shapes the identity they see in themselves. Those individuals who were kidnapped and held hostage in Sweden lost the sense of danger and misunderstood the threat level of their situation. They did not see themselves for what they were: hostages. No matter how friendly or accommodating their captor seemed, the fact of the matter was that they were not free to leave anytime they wanted. They were, in fact, being held captive. That painful reality was clear to everyone outside the situation. The Gospel is the truest story of reality we can offer our children…The metanarrative of the Gospel … puts the cross of Jesus Christ as the crux of reality. It does in full what humanity has done for centuries when we used the labels BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini, Latin for ‘In the Year of the Lord’); it places Jesus at the very center of all things, the hinge point of history.”
Tell your kids stories. But make sure you tell them the story in which every story finds its home — the story of God’s love for them in Christ.
To read the rest of Matt’s book and learn more about how to combat the false stories culture tells with the truth of Scripture, purchase The Story We Tell Our Children today.
Sam Luce is the Director of ChildDiscipleship.com at Awana. He co-authored Forming Faith, writes at samluce.substack.com, and is a frequent speaker. A former pastor of 28 years, Sam holds an M.A.BTS and a M.A.CCS from Knox Seminary and is a current doctoral candidate at Western Theological Seminary. He and his wife, Sandra, have four children and live in Upstate New York.
