Evangelicals love the Bible! We know that God speaks through it, and we love hearing from Him. That’s why we love being ‘Bible-centred’ and we are keen to make sure that shows in our ministries and our programmes. This is all wonderful but I wonder if sometimes, in youth ministry, we push this dynamic too far in a way that hampers what we are doing.
Part of the problem is that we can easily lose sight of the dynamic which the Bible sets us. In the 70s and 80s the Bible became a book about us. The reaction to this was that in the 90s and 00s we were told this was wrong; the Bible is a book about God. This has led to a model where the adult teaches, and the young person passively sits and listens. Rather, the Bible is how God speaks to us. There are two people in this encounter: the giver and the receiver. What is occurring when the Bible is opened is that we encounter God!
The young person is a full human being, made in His image with real views, opinions, doubts, and struggles. There is a good chance that we, as Christians they wish to impress, are unaware of those struggles and questions. They are in a key stage of identity formation where they are still working out what they think and believe. Ruth Perrin’s recent research suggests that wrestling through faith in the teenage years is a critical part of making faith stick into adulthood.
It often looks like their Christian walk is falling apart to us as youth leaders or parents, but this is a critical juncture and a good thing. A lack of wrestling leads to an assumed faith which may not carry them through. But if we listen and hear them in a non-judgemental way then we can have the privilege of walking through these times with them.
Our Bible ministry sets the direction of our work with teenagers, but it must also be responsive to their needs. Perhaps we need to set weeks in our calendar where we have no set teaching, but we allow them to speak, we allow them to share what is on their hearts. Perhaps we do not say anything, we do not go into preaching or conversion mode, we just listen for a week. We acknowledge what they say and recognise that these words and thoughts matter to them and should to us too.
Dare I say, sometimes we need less Bible and more listening!
