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 (7-12th) 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 19th 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.
Boom. "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." <~ that right there, sir, is so true! This was great! You should write more often. God bless you!
ReplyDelete