About

Andrew Prichard

I wanted to write something for children who weren’t ready to open the Bible, who were still ready for everything in it. The Blockbuster Bible is the closest paraphrase of the ESV and NIV I could make. I wanted to put the spotlight on God’s word, which is why the pages are smash-full of Scripture.

I wrote The Blockbuster Bible not with my own voice, but with the voice of all those parents who wanted something extra for their children. Every now and then I’d meet someone who felt the gap around the 7-13 age, who wanted to unpack those ideas in Scripture that their children were clearly ready for.

The Making Of…

I wanted to write. I wanted to be a film critic, but I also knew I wanted to create and not just review. After university I became a teacher and discovered very quickly that there were very few resources for Bible teaching in schools. Things were either aimed at churches and were too devotional, or things were a little too general for teaching the Bible thoroughly in the classroom.

At Christmas 2010 I decided I would write something, but I didn’t know what, or how long, or for whom, or anything really. Over the coming years I wrote to publishers and others in the field and got nowhere, but I knew this was something I had to do. Money in schools was the key stumbling block understandably. I felt that, if Geography and History books are available, then surely something was possible for RS/RE?

But publishers had nothing to go on. I hadn’t written before. I was talking in quite glossy terms, but I could easily have been a waste of time for them. So, in 2014 I produced a fully designed 84-page sample book called The Bible Blockbuster and went back to the publishers… Just before I went to self-publish, in 2016 I met Lion Hudson and we decided on making a children’s Bible aimed at homes and schools, both sides of the pond. It was a catch-all, but it massively lined up with all my dreams for the project. The book is now a 160-page look at the Bible story for children in any context or situation, with or without experience in the Bible before. And as you see, its name has changed!

I combined my loves of film and the Bible story in this work, but it didn’t come easily. I put my heart into it. I wanted to make the best thing I could. The time in gestation was a blessing because I could road-test and develop new ideas. When I came to write, the book was ready.