The following was written by my fifteen-year-old daughter, Anne Mary Russell.  Anne Mary attends Boyce College in Louisville, KY.  I hope you enjoy it.

The church is built on the Bible. The Bible itself says that it is “living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword… and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the soul” (Heb 4:12).[1] Each Christian is to “take the… sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Eph 6:17), and to be “a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of truth” (2 Tim 2:15). Many Christians in churches today agree with these statements, except when it comes to their children.

David Russell, photo credit: Dotti Russell

Churches should teach youth how to study the Bible, not just present immediate application lessons or Bible stories. In the modern church culture, however, youth are often fed predigested Bible stories, with generic application that requires little thought. The result is this: “70 percent of young adults ages 23-30 stopped attending church regularly for at least a year between ages 18-22.”^[2] Larry Taunton, Executive Director of Fixed Point Ministries, interviewed young atheists on college campuses. Phil, one of these atheists, described his former church as “all about ceremony, handholding, and kumbaya.”[3] The “handholding” teaching may not be an intentional watering down of the Word of God, but it is a faulty teaching method that flows from a misunderstanding of youth and their cognitive and spiritual abilities. A common belief is that youth need to be shown that the Bible is relevant more than they need to be taught how to study the Bible. Because of this idea, students are taught either a Bible story, or a few verses with application points, without any study beyond moral lessons. A student in a high school ministry told me, “[the teaching] jumps straight from a couple of verses to the practical application, like we don’t have the attention span to go any deeper.” This skip-from-story-to-application method is a foolish way to teach the Bible because it neglects to equip students to study the Bible, which has dire consequences for many students as adults.

Some leaders, however, encourage the story-and-application teaching method that was featured in my first church. Bible stories done as skits, sometimes with interaction, are normal for younger children, and simplified Bible teaching is normal for older students. Advocates for the story-and-application method include the executive producer and the writer for the KIDMO videos^[4] and Bill Baumgart, executive media music producer and president of Orbit church. They advocate for a media-driven model of youth ministry, with an interactive video set as the primary teaching mechanism. This video gives Bible stories (sometimes modernized so kids “can understand them”) and modern stories with Bible morals and “application.” These videos focus less on contemplation, and more on showing the youth how the Bible is “relevant to the unique settings and contexts where they live,” and how to apply the Bible lessons. The KIDMO videos do not teach the students to study the Bible for themselves, or to believe the Bible is true for any particular reason, but rather to apply the lessons that the videos teach them. In the team’s words, “we don’t engage in Bible study, but rather in Bible action.”^[5] Their desire for action is good, but we shouldn’t focus so much on teaching youth action that we neglect teaching them to study the Bible. Teaching action without reason trains students—intentionally or accidentally—in hypocrisy. They don’t learn why we believe Christianity, and so they don’t believe it.

These students don’t know why we believe Christianity, they don’t believe it, and they don’t even understand it. They don’t learn the relationship between law and grace, or really understand the gospel, and to them, the Bible is a list of moral stories and moral laws that are irrelevant. Then they attend church for social reasons, not to learn truth. According to a LifeWay Research study, seventeen percent of the youth who left church left because they were “only going to church to please others.” Students should have an opportunity to understand the Bible and believe that it is true, so we should not just teach them to recite application points to please their parents and peers.

Youth need lessons that go beyond a list of moral laws, and they desire that type of lesson. In Larry Taunton’s interviews, Taunton discovered several common traits of these atheists, many of whom went to Christian churches in high school. These traits include a respect for ministers who actually study and teach the Bible and a belief that the churches they used to attend ignored or sidestepped difficult questions about the world, such as “what is the nature of reality?” or “why do I exist?” Tauton writes, “Serious-minded, they often concluded that church services were largely shallow, harmless, and ultimately irrelevant.”[6] In an attempt to show how the gospel is relevant without showing how we know, we actually make it seem more irrelevant. Taunton recalls a quote from Stephanie, an atheist student: “The connection between Jesus and person’s life was not clear.”

Students care about “life’s persistent questions,”^[7] and if they can’t find the answers in a church, they look elsewhere. When students graduate from high school, they go to colleges and universities, or jobs, or careers where their faith will be challenged by other people—sometimes kind, intelligent, convincing people. Without the solid foundation that comes from knowing the Bible, these young adults will have no answers for the challenges, or for questions of their own. In church they are treated as intellectually inferior to adults, and they don’t learn how to think for themselves; then they go out into the world unprepared to answer any questions about their Christian faith, if they even have one. The best teaching covers not only application, but also hermeneutics (how to study the Bible) and apologetics (why we believe the Bible). It can include discussion or be limited to sermon style teaching, but it must go beyond a list of rules and “relevant” stories.

Statistically, twelve or thirteen of the eighteen churchgoing friends who graduate with me will leave the church. Six of them may return sporadically; four will not return at all. This breaks my heart. We are responsible, with our watered-down moral teachings that teach youth little or nothing, and our decision to ignore the tools that we have to offer them. Let’s stop and consider the teaching that we are supporting in our churches and the teaching that we are giving youth. Are we giving them the Sword of the Spirit, or a watery-youth gospel? Let’s teach students how to rightly divide the Word of Truth.

The Bible is a living, powerful, and precious gift, and should be treated as such at all times. We should teach students to take the Bible seriously, and take it seriously ourselves. When we don’t equip students to study the Bible and encourage them to believe it for specific reasons,[8] we are giving them unfair expectations. Students learn best from the teachers that treat them like people who can think, not like unintelligent robots that need to be programmed with a moral code. We should teach youth how to study the Bible because the truth in the Bible can change their eternal destinies.

Rebecca Russell, photo credit: Malia Russell

Bibliography

Rosenburg, Alex. The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2011.

Carlson, Greg. Perspectives on Children’s Spiritual Formation. Edited by Michael J. Anthony. Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2006.

McConnell, Scott. “LifeWay Research Finds Reasons 18-22 Year-Olds Drop Out of Church.” August 7, 2007. Accessed April 6, 2016, http://www.lifeway.com/Article/LifeWay-Research-finds-reasons-18-to-22-year-olds-drop-out-of-church.

Taunton, Larry. “Listening to Young Atheists: Lessons for a Stronger Christianity.” The Atlantic. June 6, 2013. Accessed April 6, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/listening-to-young-atheists-lessons-for-a-stronger-christianity/276584/

[1] All references are NKJV unless otherwise marked

[2] Scott McConnell, “LifeWay Research Finds Reasons 18-22 Year-Olds Are Leaving the Church,” LifeWay Blog, August 7, 2007. Accessed April 6, 2016, http://www.lifeway.com/Article/LifeWay-Research-finds-reasons-18-to-22-year-olds-drop-out-of-church.

[3] Larry Taunton, “Listening to Young Atheist: Lessons for a Stronger Christianity,” The Atlantic, June 6, 2013. Accessed April 25, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/listening-to-young-atheists-lessons-for-a-stronger-christianity/276584/.

[4] KIDMO is an interactive video system for showing children “big truths” from the Bible

[5] Greg Carlson, Tim Ellis, Trisha Graves, and Scottie May, Perspectives on Children’s Spiritual Formation (Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2006), 232, 245.

[6] Larry Taunton, “Listening to Young Atheist: Lessons for a Stronger Christianity,” The Atlantic, June 6, 2013. Accessed April 25, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/listening-to-young-atheists-lessons-for-a-stronger-christianity/276584/.

[7] Alex Rosenburg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2011), 1-3.

[8] A good resource for why we should believe the Bible is Greg Gilbert’s book Why Trust the Bible?.