When Keeping It Simple Goes Wrong

When Keeping It Simple Goes Wrong

“You have got to keep it simple.” These were the words uttered to me by another small bible fellowship teacher at my church in regards to teaching young people (7-12^th) grade. It wasn’t until after the fact that these words started to press heavily upon my heart. Over the next few weeks that statement really started to bother me. A lot of people will agree and there are statistics to back it up that the Christian community is doing a terrible job of reaching generation y ( 12-32 year olds). It is my honest opinion that one of the reasons they are being lost is because the church has resolved to “just keeping it simple”. I want to take the opportunity in this space to go over two issues that I see with this approach.

I once heard Matt Chandler say “American Christianity is 3000 feet wide and 10 feet deep”. In other words we have a lot of people who profess to be Christians, yet have no clue what that even means. I think we are making a huge mistake with young people by not taking them deeper into who God is and truly understanding what Jesus life, death, and resurrection really meant.  We end up feeding these young people baby food for their entire youth so that when they become older members of the church they are still infants in Christ. Let us take for example, Charles Spurgeon, one of the greatest theologians of the 19^th century and maybe ever. He began pastoring a church at age 17. I find it hard to believe that with the technology and resources we have today that we cannot challenge young people because they might not understand. Honestly, it is probably the teacher who fails to understand more than anything. It is no secret that I am a pretty big nerd, especially when it comes to mobile technology. I started dabbling in developing apps and other things for Android phones several years ago. One of the more shocking things is that a lot of the power developers in the community are 13-19. I find it interesting that a bunch of young people, who can learn java (one of the hardest programming languages), graphic design, kernel building, etc.., can’t grasp the doctrine of justification.  Until we start to grasp the depth of who God is, His whole counsel of attributes, important doctrines that the church stands behind, and many others, we will continue to fail our young people.

The second thing that I believe “keeping it simple” does is simply teach moralism. We tend to take a figure like King David and tell young people, you need to be like David, while we list all of his awesome accomplishments. We fail to talk about his affair with Bathsheba, and that fact that David sought true repentance afterwards, thus being labeled a man after God’s own heart. We also fail to mention that on his deathbed David tells Solomon to go kill Joab breaking a promise with God that he wouldn’t have Joab killed, justifying it by saying that he didn’t promise God that Solomon wouldn’t him (1 Kings 2). We could easily use this illustration to show that even men after God’s own heart are tempted and sin right up until we part from this earth, showing just how important Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection really are. Instead we “keep it simple” and rehash David and Goliath each year.  In doing this we create a haven for moralism. It becomes all about what the Christian does, and less and less about what Jesus did. We look at all these bible characters and use them as moral compasses instead of showing that they are shadows, as the writer of Hebrews, would say. 

We spend Sunday after Sunday telling young people what they should and shouldn’t do instead of telling them what Jesus has already done, to rest in that, meditate in that, and let His grace propel you to honor His sacrifice with your life.  Ultimately by “keeping it simple”, we have to attach things to the gospel so we can keep a moral leash around people. It becomes Jesus + works instead of just Jesus and His finished work. This goes on year after year until you have young people who feel that they have put God in debt to them by their ability to white knuckle moral behavior. When suffering comes, it is treated as God being unfair to them, even though they have been “such a good person”. If we were to engage them truly and show them that Paul says “No man, not one, is good” maybe just maybe they would have a different perspective. What if we showed them where their Savior boldly says that his children will experience persecution and suffering? We miss out on these important details by “keeping it simple”, simply resulting in moralism. What if instead of talking about eschatology in the sense of Jesus is coming soon, you better stop that drinking and smoking, we show them that Revelation is actually a book of God’s promises and that our hope in the suffering and persecution we suffer here on earth resides in the promises of that book. 

I truly believe that we must engage our young people with the truth as it is laid out in the scriptures and that we must wean them off of baby milk and get them to the hard food. How much more powerful would the church be if the young people were serious spiritual warriors, buried in the grace and mercy of Christ’s finished work verses just “good people”?  Jesus commanded us to make disciples, who make disciples, and I believe that “keeping it simple” is failing miserably at getting this done.