Name

On more than one occasion as a child in church, I was taught about the Parable of the Mustard Seed. Those classic Sunday School lessons always involved a simple activity where we’d plant a mustard seed in a small cardboard container and cotton wool and then check the following week to see how much our little seed had grown.

Seeds planted in cotton wool.

I believe this is a great metaphor for the state of many churched young people’s understanding about the Bible and core Christian doctrine. They know that Jesus told a parable about a mustard seed but have no grasp of how that parable relays the deeply subversive, all consuming nature of the Kingdom of God. Or they academically understand the deeply subversive nature of the Kingdom of God, but that concept hasn’t become embedded in how they live their lives. Seeds of knowledge have been planted but end up in nothing more than nondescript white fluffiness with little opportunity to put anything other than the shallowest of roots down and so they never really grow.

(At this point let me pause to say that this isn’t a criticism of children’s work - i’m aware there’s only so much depth you can go into with five year olds. More to the point there are many church leaders, youth and kids workers, parents, and ministries out there that do a great job! However, there is still no denying the truth in this next comment...)

Anyone who has spent any time doing youth work within a church context knows that a lot of Christian young people carry extremely strong beliefs that are often rooted deeply in nothing more than white fluffiness. And when asked to explain what those beliefs are or why they hold them their answers are unsurprisingly vague. They cannot name them.

Names are clear, concise and specific. They are tangible. If you use a name that somebody knows then they can picture who or where or what you’re talking about. I’ve been reflecting for a couple of months around the need to be more clear, concise, and specific, more tangible, with my theology. What do I think, and why do I think it. If I can’t explain that, how on earth can I expect people to be able to grapple with what I’m talking about? Or be able explain it to others?

The challenge is that theology is not simple. The fact that there are disagreements held between some of the deepest and most intelligent theologians in history demonstrates that fact. But what use is studying it, and how on earth can we build our lives on it, if we cannot at least make it tangible to ourselves or other people. We have to be able to name it to a certain extent!

This might sound stupidly obvious - of course its important we are able to explain what we believe and why. But how we do that and the language we use is often the issue. Terms like "sin" or phrases like "Jesus died for you" lack meaning and explanation. In my experience a lot of Christian young people know that Jesus died to take away their sins but they can't explain to you why or how that happened. Neither do they have a particularly developed understanding of what sin is or why being saved from it is the best news the world has ever heard! So in naming this stuff we have to use our imaginations...

The need to think properly around this issues was triggered for me recently when reading The New Conspirators by Tom Sine. Sine talks about the need to be able to name our understanding of heaven - to make the idea of Christian hope truly tangible. The prophets in the Bible did this, but they used language contemporary to those they were speaking to. We are no longer contemporaries of that time and that language and so can sometimes struggle to get passionate about what they wrote. If however, we can take the theological concepts of heaven and use our imaginations a bit to apply it to our immediate context, we can paint an image of the hope of heaven that is extremely tangible, and very easy to get passion about...

Sine gives us the example of a very tangible description of heaven as imagined by Anthony, a 13 year old boy from the Bronx in New York:

“God will be there. He'll be happy that we have arrived. People shall come hand-in-hand. It will be bright, not dim and glooming like on earth. All friendly animals will be there, but no mean ones. As for television, forget it! If you want vision, you can use your own eyes ot see the people that you love. No one will look at you from the outside. People will see you from the inside. All the people from the street will be there. My uncle will be there and he will be healed. You won’t see him buying drugs, because there won’t be money. Mr Mongo will be there too. You might see him happy for a change... No violence will there be in heaven. There will be no guns, or drugs or IRS. You won’t have to pay taxes. You’ll recognize all the children who have died when they were little. Jesus will be good to them and play with them. At night he’ll come and visit at your house. God will be fond of you.”

(Sine, 2008, 101-102)

Beautiful isn’t it? Tangible, real, personal, simple, easy to grasp and very easy to get passionate about. This is a truly biblical understanding of heaven explained in a truly contemporary and relevant way. Imagine if all of our theologizing was like this!

The fact that young people can’t always name what they believe and why isn’t necessarily their fault. If those who have had responsibility to teach them about the Christian faith have not been clear and concise in how they’ve gone about it, its unsurprising they end up with fluffy, undeveloped, knowledge. I count myself as part of the problem here: I know I have screwed this up. I have a tendency to use long and unhelpful words and convoluted (classic example) sentences to explain what I think. So I haven’t helped this problem. But I desperately want to address this.

Overcoming this issue is not a solo endeavor though. Building theology is a corporate activity. It takes multiple minds working together, each bringing their God given gifts, their Holy Spirit prompted insights, and their frustrated questions to the table. Contextualizing the gospel into genuinely tangible language and imagery also takes a lot of tim. You must embed yourself into the lives and culture of those you are helping to synthesise Christian theology, helping them understand it in their own terms. But the time it takes is worth it if the outcome is that people are able to name and own what they believe and explain how and why they’ve come to believe it.

I’m not foolish enough to believe that we can fully name, with simplistic and tangible words and imagery the enormous mysterious nature of God. He is unfathomable. Paul describes trying to understand God as like looking into a clouded mirror; we get an idea but we can’t, in this lifetime, ever truly, fully, understand Him. However, if we can present the mirror to young people (or anyone for that matter), help them gaze into it for themselves, and help them to name what they see, we will have done them a real service. And isn’t that what youth leadership, theological teaching, mission and evangelism all about?

Over my next few posts, I’ll be exploring this idea of naming what I think and why further. As I do, I invite you to participate in the conversation. Please help me shape and sharpen what I’m thinking! Doing this in community is a necessity!

Hey… If we're going to be a community in this, what should we name ourselves?