After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.
– Luke 2
It shouldn’t surprise us that the teachers Jesus sat with were older men, since in our own context we are used to older folks hanging around the church. Like our older people, these older men normally handed on the interpretative tradition that was given to them. They told youngsters what it really meant to be Jewish, to read the law and the prophets with understanding. They told young people like Jesus how it was done in the past so that they could faithfully do it in the future. Something happened in this instance however, something that shook things up a bit. The young person taught back. Instead of receiving the tradition of how to understand scripture, Jesus gave a new understanding of how to read scripture. This is a reoccurring theme in Luke (see the Emmaus road story which was included at CY06); Jesus teaching others how to understand scripture, but the first time he did it he was a young person.
The church, through the Planning Team of CY06, asked Colleen Wood and myself to be those “old men” for CY06. We co-wrote the curriculum that guided the small groups of youth who met daily, in essence sitting down through the small group leaders with each youth and interpreting scripture on a daily basis. As we approached our task, we wanted to give teens the tools to interpret scripture faithfully and innovatively. That is, we wanted teens to stand in the tradition of our church but also allow them to put forward new and potentially prophetic readings. For me, three important principles guided my writing.
It’s about the Bible
Too often, we provide youth with principles rather than giving them the tools they need to read the Bible for all it’s worth. Commonly, adults will read the text, discern some underlying principles, design some engaging activities that point to the principle and then have a discussion with youth about how to apply those principles to our everyday lives. There is nothing inherently wrong with this process but it does not really engage youth in reading the Bible; it engages them in the principles underlying the story that adults see. For example, the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10 could be summarized as being about loving others even when it is difficult. Love is the principle and then we move quickly to application of how we might love others, say in our high schools.
If Jesus had wanted us to know the principle, wouldn’t it have been more effective to simply state it rather than telling stories? There are truths that we encounter when we read a story that cannot get expressed as principles. The CY curriculum attempted to allow youth to experience the truth of the text rather than the principles that adults summarized from their reading. For instance, instead of giving small proof texts that illustrate the underlying principle, the small groups struggled with large chunks of scripture. Small groups had the opportunity to read almost the entire book of Jonah, engaging with the text rather than with what Colleen and I thought was important.
Youth have smarts
In recent years, Christian educators have realized that for too long our curriculums catered to a particular kind of youth to the exclusion of others. Reading and writing are two forms of intelligence but they are not the only forms. And when all our activities capitalize on the strengths of reading and writing we do a disservice to the many youth who are not gifted with those particular ways of learning. In many churches, curriculums like the workshop rotation model attempt to capitalize on the many different ways that people learn.
While this is true and we attempted to take into consideration these multiple ways of learning, we are still a people of the book. All youth must meet certain expectations about reading in school to graduate regardless of their natural way of learning. This is because each way of learning has strengths and weaknesses. As a people of the book, we as Christians must help everyone to read the Bible, regardless of what their natural inclination is. The CY curriculum attempted to give youth some tools so they could read and interpret scripture. Small groups had a chance to ask theological questions of the text, to try to understand the role of context in determining meaning and to probe the implications of different genres in interpretation.
The Bible is about we, not me
While at CY, another leader was asking some serious questions about the curriculum. Do we really want every youth to have the motivation and the tools to read scripture? What if they actually do it and then come up with some crazy ideas? Are there no boundaries to what the Bible might mean and shouldn’t we teach youth some of these boundaries? My response is two fold. First, sometimes boundaries need pushing and youth, like Jesus in the temple, can act as the prophetic voice that pushes us as a church. The Word of God continues to speak to us today and we are a church always searching to hear what God says, both at the centre but also at the edges of our community.
Secondly, CY has a natural limit built into it — small groups. Jesus was not in the temple alone. No youth at CY read the Bible alone but always in the context of community. The Bible is always personal but it is never private for us as Presbyterians. We worship together, we study together, we break bread together. As it has been in history, we collectively listen for the Word of God to speak to us. Youth read scripture as individuals in groups of two, 12, 25 and 600 and in doing so modeled the ideal way of reading the Bible — as a church listening for God’s voice to us today.
