‘Hey, Dad, the sermon today was 1 hour 7 minutes and 20 seconds long. All in Portuguese.’
My gap-year daughter was on her regular Sunday collect-call home from her short-term mission placement in Brazil. ‘So I spent the time memorising the books of the Bible. Do you want to know what they are? Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus….’ My first thought was: ‘I’m paying for this call while you rattle off all the books of the Bible’. My second was: ‘Isn’t it great that my teenage daughter wants to knows her way around the Bible?’
I am a ‘Baby Boomer’ — born shortly after World War II, childhood in the 50s, teens in the 60s, young adulthood in the 70s. Suzy, by definition a generation down, is defying (I hope) a trend that is identified in the survey, Living the Christian Life: Becoming Like Jesus.* This survey, commissioned by the Langham Partnership and conducted by the Brierley Consultancy, examined the habits of Christian discipleship in the British evangelical church in 2012 — including our use (or not) of the Bible and the influence it has (or not) on our lives in many areas.
Declining influence in the young
Among its findings is the observation: ‘The Bible is not influencing younger people in church congregations as much as it does older people’. The dividing line was between those under or over 40, and the range of issues in the questionnaire included not just matters of faith, knowledge of God, spiritual comfort, personal guidance, etc., but also practical concerns such as family, material possessions and wealth, the poor and disadvantaged, college, work and retirement. In all areas it was found that a considerably higher percentage of the older generation claimed that the Bible influenced their thinking and attitudes than did the younger generation.
I can’t claim to know why younger Christians are making less use of the Bible to shape their thinking and practice, but I can at least reflect on how and why the Bible came to have such a defining influence on my own, and raise the question as to whether there might be some creative contemporary equivalents or principles that would appeal to younger folk today.
1. I was taught to know my way around the Bible as a whole
I grew up in Northern Ireland. Evangelical church culture there placed very high value on making sure children and young people knew their Bibles. A favourite activity was ‘Sword drill’ — popular in the weekly Crusader Class to which I belonged. Everybody gripped their Bible in one hand and thrust it under the other arm. The leader would call out a verse reference, shout ‘Draw’, and we’d all whip out our Bibles and the first person to find the verse would leap up and read it aloud. The aim (and it was effectively achieved) was that we should know our way around the Bible and be familiar with the order of all its books and which Testament they were in.
Phone drill?
Of course, this would be somewhat challenging if the ‘sword’ were a mobile phone, not a printed Bible. It would be a test of who had the fastest thumbs, not who knew their Bible best. In fact, I wonder if having electronic Bibles, on phones and laptops or (like Moses) on tablets, is diminishing people’s ‘feel’ for the whole Bible. With such devices, you never get the sense of a whole book. You aren’t immediately aware of where a particular book comes in the whole Bible, in the way you are from its position in a physical book. You don’t need to know whether Joshua comes before or after Psalms, or even before or after Matthew. Just click and read.
Creative restoration?
Are there ways that some creative minds among the internet indigenous generation could address this and find interesting electronic ways of helping people know the Bible as a whole, in its great canonical structure and order?
Why does this matter? Because the canon is theologically important. The chronological order of events matters. Paul’s understanding of the law in relation to God’s promise and saving grace, for example, depends on it. We need to recognise the great canonical blocks in the biblical library (torah, history, worship, wisdom, prophets, gospel, letters) and their relationships and significance. I think I absorbed the meaning and importance of these things simply by getting to know my way around the Bible, learning the order and grouping of the books till they were as familiar as the alphabet (though I still fumble with the minor prophets…). Is this something that needs some creative restoration?
2. I was taught to know the content of the Bible thoroughly
Back to my Belfast upbringing. There were quizzes all the time. In Sunday school, in Crusader class, in Boys Brigade. There were annual team competitions like University Challenge between Crusader classes on Bible knowledge. There were cups and prizes for such prowess, and also for Bible memorisation. I would like to think that my eagerness to get to know the detailed content of the Bible was not just to win prizes, but was simply part of my developing Christian faith from childhood.
Nevertheless, my point is that there was a culture that valued it, an external stimulus that made it exciting and worthwhile to grow in sheer Bible knowledge. Is there anything that could recreate that kind of culture and excitement in the dialects of a new generation today?
Why does this matter? Most basically because you can’t be influenced by the Bible if you don’t know what’s in it. Bible ignorance generates unbiblical attitudes and behaviour. But, more importantly, it is by knowing the whole Bible, and the great sweep of its grand narrative (from creation, through the fall, the story of redemption in history centred on the cross and resurrection of Christ, the mission of the church, to the new creation), that we learn to live in the light of the Bible’s story, indeed, to see our place within that story and let it govern our thinking, attitudes and behaviour. There is no biblical living without Bible knowledge.
3. I grew up under quality biblical preaching and teaching
For ten years, including my teenage years, I sat under the ministry of the Rev. J. Glyn Owen. Every Sunday, morning and evening, he preached through whole books of the Bible, opening up the text to our minds, moving our hearts and emotions with his Welsh passion, and applying it to our lives. I filled many notebooks from those sermons. I would say that, second only to the influence of my parents, the faithful preaching of God’s word in our church shaped my life, weaving the texture of knowledge and commitment, of faith and aspirations, of character, values and principles that hold a life together over the decades.
Bible teaching role models
I was also blessed by youth group leaders, not very much older than myself, to whom I looked up with great admiration as role models (and rugby players, of course), who gave us clear applied teaching from the Bible on all kinds of issues — evidence for the resurrection, ethics of sex and marriage, how to resist temptation, etc. This combination of pulpit exposition and group teaching gave us the tools to explore the Bible for ourselves and an intuitive methodology for how to apply its teaching to our lives. Is that kind of equipping lacking for younger Christians today? What can we do to recover it? Does the younger generation have role models of their own age range who generate confidence in the relevance of the Bible to the issues they face?
The Brierley survey does not reveal if more of the older generation were blessed with that kind of biblical ministry in the past, or if the declining influence of the Bible on the younger generation reflects a decline in the kind of preaching and teaching that systematically and engagingly explains the Bible and applies it relevantly to life. But I suspect there may be a link.
John Stott’s vision was clear on this point: ‘My vision, as I look out over the world, is to see every pulpit in every church occupied by a conscientious, Bible-believing, Bible-studying, Bible-expounding pastor … and, as he ministers week after week, I see people changing under the influence of God’s Word, and becoming more and more the people God wants them to be, in understanding and obedience, in faith and love, in worship, holiness, unity, service and mission’.
From that vision has emerged the work of the Langham Partnership, with the goal of equipping a new generation of Bible teachers. Our longing is to see a new generation of Bible hearers and Bible doers.
* If you would like a hard copy of the Brierley survey, send your name and postal address to: Langham Partnership, PO Box 669, Chichester PO19 9LA.
Chris Wright is International Ministries Director of the Langham Partnership.
