Jennifer Kvamme, More to the Story: Deep Answers to Real Questions on Attraction, Identity, and Relationships (The Good Book Company, 2024)
Jennifer Kvamme has been in youth ministry for two decades, and it shows.
Her book More to the Story is so clearly informed by her experience with, love for and attentiveness to young people. She writes in an easy, conversational tone that works well for her teenage target readers. She understands the range of experiences that those readers might have had and anticipates all the questions that they might ask, speaking into all of this with compassion and biblical truth.
What Does It Cover?
The first section of the book sets the scene by laying out the gospel. As Jennifer says, readers shouldn’t skip this part – it lays key foundations for the next section and for specific questions about sexuality and gender. This first section clearly presents the gospel story, and shows how that big story relates to our sexuality and sexual choices – how sexuality is ‘a glimpse of something deeper’ (p. 13).
The second section of the book tackles ten big questions – everything from the significance of our bodies to what we’re supposed to do with our sexual desires to how we use screens in relation to sexuality. Individual chapters are devoted to questions of gender confusion and same-sex attraction, obviously huge questions for young people today and key areas for us at Living Out.
A particular highlight for me was the chapter on dating.
A particular highlight for me was the chapter on dating. I’ve come across so little good Christian content on this, both when I was a young person myself (and the advice essentially started and ended with ‘Don’t have sex until you’re married’) and as a youth worker wanting to help my young people navigate this difficult terrain. Jennifer highlights some key principles that have stayed with me, for example: ‘What can you do to ensure that if you broke up tomorrow, they could say that you brought them honour and caused no harm?’ (p.136).
The final chapter before the conclusion is about abuse. Again, this is something that many young people are asking questions about, whether for themselves or their friends, or because of the awareness their socials give them of abuses and injustices in the world. My only critique of this chapter is that it’s brief, but this brevity is perhaps wise: ‘I am not a therapist, and even if I were, helping people find healing from abuse is beyond the scope of a single book chapter’ (p.194). By touching on God’s heart for the afflicted, his justice, and the way he heals, this chapter at least gives young people a starting point for thinking biblically about their questions and experiences and inviting God into them. It also encourages them to speak to a trusted adult about abuse they have experienced or are experiencing, which is probably the best advice a book can give.
Throughout the book, Jennifer places a high value on both marriage and singleness, with Jesus as an even higher value. In a Christian culture that so often says singleness is good but means that singleness is the runner-up prize and marriage is really the best goal, this was refreshing.
Jennifer places a high value on both marriage and singleness, with Jesus as an even higher value.
Partly in response to the selfish idea that being single means I can do whatever I want, Jennifer leans hard into the idea that singleness provides wonderful opportunities to serve. This is, of course, true. But singleness is not just meaningful because of what we do with it – it’s inherently meaningful, pointing to our future life with Jesus in a different way than marriage does. I’d want to shift the balance of the chapter more towards unpacking that big picture idea rather than just thinking about different ways we can use our singleness to serve. But it’s worth saying that this falls within the context of a whole chapter given over to discussing singleness as a viable, life-giving option – as I said, refreshing!
How Should I Use It?
More to the Story would be a great resource to use in a group setting. You could read a chapter aloud or listen to the audiobook together, and then have a conversation about what you’ve heard. There are reflection questions at the end of each chapter and a discussion guide at the end of the book which could help shape these conversations. Equally, you could give out copies for your young people to read in their own time – there's nothing in here that I would be wary of my young people reading unsupervised!
The second section of the book does seem to assume that the reader is a Christian, but since the first section is so clear on the gospel, I can imagine a non-Christian still finding the book very clear and helpful. It would work well as an evangelistic tool or as a discipleship tool for new believers.
I wouldn’t hesitate to share More to the Story with the whole range of teens in my youth group – those exploring faith, those struggling with personal questions around sexuality or gender, and those who are unsure how to respond to their friends or to the world around them. Whether you share it with your whole group or not, I’d definitely read it for yourself (it models some great ways of communicating these ideas with young people) and keep a copy on the youth group bookshelf.
