How to make the Bible come alive for young Catholics — again or for the very first time
This article originally appeared in the March 2014 issue of Ministry and Liturgy.
Familiarity breeds contempt — but so does ignorance. For most young adults today, it is ignorance rather than familiarity that is driving their disdain or dismissal of the Bible. It’s not that they have tried reading Scripture and disliked it. It’s that they haven’t even tried it or had it presented to them in a way that makes sense to them.
I volunteered to teach the high school religious education program at our parish for several years. I quickly realized that, often despite eight years of Catholic elementary schooling, most of the kids in the class really had no idea what is in the Bible or why they should be interested in it. I only had them once a week for about 75 minutes, with time off for summers and holidays. If I was lucky, they hung around for all four years.
I decided that the best religious education I could offer would be to give them a basic understanding (and love of, if I could) the Scriptures. So the first year was called “Who was Jesus and why should I care?” in which we studied the Gospels. The second was “Where did Jesus come from and what was he like?” in which we covered the entire Old Testament. The third was “Why did Jesus have to leave and what happened immediately after he did?” in which we looked at the Acts of the Apostles. The fourth was “How are we supposed to live if we want to follow Jesus today?” in which we went through the letters and Revelation.
There were only six to eight high schoolers in the class at any one time. Most of the teenagers in our parish went to Catholic high schools or were just unwilling to do any more religious education after they had been confirmed in eighth grade. The ones I had came and went and finally graduated. Since they were so few, all of them were in the same class each year. If they stayed for four years, no matter when they started, they would get all of my little curriculum. My son was in the class; so was my godson. The class never played basketball or had pizza or went to an arcade or on a retreat. This was not a “youth group.” We met from 9:00 to 10:15 on Sunday mornings, so they could attend Mass before or after the class if they wanted. It was serious religious education. I treated them as adults. I taught them what I knew about the Bible. The rest was up to them.
I would tell my students at the beginning of each year that I never understood how people could make religion boring. It is, after all, about the ultimate meaning of life and how we should live our lives. Then I told them stories from the Bible for four years. I’m not sure how the students took my teaching or whether it affected their lives. You’d have to ask them. But I learned a lot, and here’s what I learned.
1. The Bible is awesome to young people when it is presented in an interesting way.
Young people need to understand the time line the Bible covers. One of the things they like is to see where the events of the Bible fit on the time line of other events in history that they know or are studying. After all, Moses and the events of the Exodus were about 4,000 years ago; Jesus was born more than 2,000 years ago; his public ministry lasted only three or so years out of his relatively short life; and the Bible itself ends about 100 years after his birth. If young people don’t get a sense of that time line, they cannot grasp what is going on in the Scriptures or why the language and events and customs are so different from ours today.
They also like to spend a lot of time with maps. Here is Egypt, Rome, Antioch, the island of Patmos; this is how Jesus would have walked from Galilee to Jerusalem; here is where he would have met the Samaritan woman; he would have stayed in this town outside of Jerusalem with Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. Moses would have tended sheep in that area after he fled Egypt; the walls of Jericho would have tumbled over there; Sinai and Horeb are probably different names for the same mountain; Saul of Tarsus (St. Paul) would have been born in what is now Turkey; here are the mission journeys he took. With a good sense of geography, young people can then relate what is going on in the world today with what is going on in the Bible.
Young people know the Bible is made up of stories based on historical experience, not history as we know it today. Did Abraham and Sarah, not to mention Adam and Eve, actually exist? Did David write any, not to mention all, of the Psalms? Was Isaiah one guy or three or more? Did Judith, Ruth, Esther, and Tobit really live and do what the Bible says they did, or were they archetypes for stories about the human condition and background for Jewish and early Christian history? Did prophets tell the future or interpret the present? Young people are open to all these questions. They are not hung up on doctrinal questions of “inerrancy” or “inspiration.” To them, the Bible is what it appears to be: a holy book that maybe they should pay attention to. If we want to call it the “word of God,” that is fine with them, but they are certainly not there yet. It’s not the word of God because we say it is; it’s the word of God when it speaks to them.
Young people can hack metaphor. They get parables. They understand hyperbole. They are not surprised by contradictions. They are not literalists. Nor do they expect scientific knowledge from people who didn’t know that the Earth revolves around the sun or that germs cause disease or that humans evolved over hundreds of thousands of years.
So in my experience, young people like the Bible if it is presented to them as a living, breathing document of the human race’s encounter with the divine reality.
2. Young people need what is in the Bible.
I am pretty sure young people need the wisdom the Bible contains. Those kids I taught for seven years are now in their twenties. My wife, Kathy, and I have three young twenty-somethings. They are all in the process of searching for a mission worthy of their lives. The Bible has one. It is the best vocation human beings can be offered — that is, participation in the divine plan for the universe.
The first question the Bible answers is, “Is there a God and what is God like?” This revelation permeates the Scripture, but it is not at all clear what the answer is right away. The Bible starts with the story of creation, in which God looks at the world and human beings and declares that they are “good.” But God has a definite vision for the world as it should be, and initially human beings don’t buy in to it. They want to go off on their own and do things their way. Hence the stories of the fall, Cain and Abel, Noah, and so on.
Finally, God picks what seems to be a random couple, Abraham and Sarah, and decides to work through them and their heirs. They are the first to respond to the universal human vocation: to follow a God they really do not know, to an unknown and unnamed foreign land, to do something that seems impossible. The rest of the Old Testament is really the story of Abraham and Sarah and their descendants struggling to fulfill that calling.
The New Testament, for Christians, is the story of one of those descendents, a Jew of the house of David, who claims to know the true nature of God and what God wants of all people. Jesus of Nazareth has some surprising answers to those questions. First, he claims intimate knowledge of God, calling him his “Abba” or “Daddy.” The Father, according to Jesus, is most like a loving, generous parent who wants only good things for the human race. God is understanding, forgiving, and supportive. This view of God was a big surprise to a lot of people at the time, who saw God as fearsome, judgmental, and even vindictive.
Jesus also had a definite idea of what this God of love wanted from us: to make the world more like the way a loving parent would have it. Jesus called this vision of the world as it should be “the kingdom of God,” and he apparently thought that it has already begun and would ultimately triumph “on earth as it already has in heaven.” These teachings were threatening to and rejected by most of the people of his time, but ultimately a small group — led by people like Peter, Paul, James, Mary of Nazareth, Mary of Magdala, and others — bought in to the mission and spread the message over the entire Mediterranean world.
In a nutshell, that’s what’s in the Bible, and its call to transform the world into the kingdom of God is what a lot of young people are looking for right now, even if they don’t know it.
3. The Bible must be broken open and scraped of barnacles for young people.
The problem is that most young people don’t read the Bible (or have it read to them). Its language is formal, stiff, “churchy,” and hard to understand for people coming of age in the 21st century. It has to be made to come alive for them for what it is — a road map for how to live a happy, fulfilled life.
I’ve done two things to try to help. First, I have learned from a few priests and others how to retell the Bible stories so they make sense to young people. Here is one example I use in talks I give to young people:
A man had two sons. He said to the first son, “Please mow the lawn for me before you go out.”
“Of course, Dad,” the son said. But then his friends pulled up in a car, and he jumped in and went off with them without mowing the lawn.
About a half hour later, the second son came down the stairs and the father said, “Please mow the lawn for me.”
“Aw, Dad,” the second son said. “I always have to do it. I did it last time. It’s my brother’s turn. Besides, I’m going out with my friends, and here they are just pulling up. I won’t do it.”
The second son then went out to his friends’ car, opened the door, and said to them, “Sorry, guys. I’ve got to mow the lawn for my dad. Pick me back up in 30 minutes.” Then he went and mowed the lawn.
Now, which of the two boys did what the father asked?
Young people get this story when I tell it this way. Then I tell them that Jesus told this to a bunch of people who were trying to trip him up, and when they answered correctly, “the second son,” Jesus immediately said to them, “You know, the prostitutes and politicians are entering the kingdom of God before you are.” Then we have a very rich conversation about why gentle Jesus would have said something like that to his critics, even after they had given him the right answer. The Bible is full of stories like this one. They just need to be retold by someone who believes them in language young people can relate to. I believe this is called preaching and teaching.
The second thing I’ve done to help is publish a new translation of the Bible. Yes, that’s right. My little publishing company, with a total of six employees, recently published a 2,000-page translation of the Bible in contemporary American English. It is called The Message: Catholic/Ecumenical Edition by Eugene Peterson, with the Catholic-recognized Deuterocanonical writings translated by William Griffin. This is not an “official” translation of the Bible, but it is an original translation from ancient languages that anyone can read and understand. (See the sidebars that accompany this article.)
The Message is a “reader’s” Bible. There are no footnotes in it. It will probably never be used at Mass or as a text for formal catechesis. But if it would get our young people to read the Bible and perhaps fall in love with it, wouldn’t it be worth trying? (The original, Protestant version of The Message has sold more than 16 million copies in various editions, many of them to young adults. But then, everyone knows that Protestants read the Bible and Catholics don’t. Hmmm.)
I’m sure many of you out there are having success in getting the Bible to come alive for young people. Let’s start sharing our experiences.
I volunteered to teach the high school religious education program at our parish for several years. I quickly realized that, often despite eight years of Catholic elementary schooling, most of the kids in the class really had no idea what is in the Bible or why they should be interested in it. I only had them once a week for about 75 minutes, with time off for summers and holidays. If I was lucky, they hung around for all four years.
I decided that the best religious education I could offer would be to give them a basic understanding (and love of, if I could) the Scriptures. So the first year was called “Who was Jesus and why should I care?” in which we studied the Gospels. The second was “Where did Jesus come from and what was he like?” in which we covered the entire Old Testament. The third was “Why did Jesus have to leave and what happened immediately after he did?” in which we looked at the Acts of the Apostles. The fourth was “How are we supposed to live if we want to follow Jesus today?” in which we went through the letters and Revelation.
There were only six to eight high schoolers in the class at any one time. Most of the teenagers in our parish went to Catholic high schools or were just unwilling to do any more religious education after they had been confirmed in eighth grade. The ones I had came and went and finally graduated. Since they were so few, all of them were in the same class each year. If they stayed for four years, no matter when they started, they would get all of my little curriculum. My son was in the class; so was my godson. The class never played basketball or had pizza or went to an arcade or on a retreat. This was not a “youth group.” We met from 9:00 to 10:15 on Sunday mornings, so they could attend Mass before or after the class if they wanted. It was serious religious education. I treated them as adults. I taught them what I knew about the Bible. The rest was up to them.
I would tell my students at the beginning of each year that I never understood how people could make religion boring. It is, after all, about the ultimate meaning of life and how we should live our lives. Then I told them stories from the Bible for four years. I’m not sure how the students took my teaching or whether it affected their lives. You’d have to ask them. But I learned a lot, and here’s what I learned.
1. The Bible is awesome to young people when it is presented in an interesting way.
Young people need to understand the time line the Bible covers. One of the things they like is to see where the events of the Bible fit on the time line of other events in history that they know or are studying. After all, Moses and the events of the Exodus were about 4,000 years ago; Jesus was born more than 2,000 years ago; his public ministry lasted only three or so years out of his relatively short life; and the Bible itself ends about 100 years after his birth. If young people don’t get a sense of that time line, they cannot grasp what is going on in the Scriptures or why the language and events and customs are so different from ours today.
They also like to spend a lot of time with maps. Here is Egypt, Rome, Antioch, the island of Patmos; this is how Jesus would have walked from Galilee to Jerusalem; here is where he would have met the Samaritan woman; he would have stayed in this town outside of Jerusalem with Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. Moses would have tended sheep in that area after he fled Egypt; the walls of Jericho would have tumbled over there; Sinai and Horeb are probably different names for the same mountain; Saul of Tarsus (St. Paul) would have been born in what is now Turkey; here are the mission journeys he took. With a good sense of geography, young people can then relate what is going on in the world today with what is going on in the Bible.
Young people know the Bible is made up of stories based on historical experience, not history as we know it today. Did Abraham and Sarah, not to mention Adam and Eve, actually exist? Did David write any, not to mention all, of the Psalms? Was Isaiah one guy or three or more? Did Judith, Ruth, Esther, and Tobit really live and do what the Bible says they did, or were they archetypes for stories about the human condition and background for Jewish and early Christian history? Did prophets tell the future or interpret the present? Young people are open to all these questions. They are not hung up on doctrinal questions of “inerrancy” or “inspiration.” To them, the Bible is what it appears to be: a holy book that maybe they should pay attention to. If we want to call it the “word of God,” that is fine with them, but they are certainly not there yet. It’s not the word of God because we say it is; it’s the word of God when it speaks to them.
Young people can hack metaphor. They get parables. They understand hyperbole. They are not surprised by contradictions. They are not literalists. Nor do they expect scientific knowledge from people who didn’t know that the Earth revolves around the sun or that germs cause disease or that humans evolved over hundreds of thousands of years.
So in my experience, young people like the Bible if it is presented to them as a living, breathing document of the human race’s encounter with the divine reality.
2. Young people need what is in the Bible.
I am pretty sure young people need the wisdom the Bible contains. Those kids I taught for seven years are now in their twenties. My wife, Kathy, and I have three young twenty-somethings. They are all in the process of searching for a mission worthy of their lives. The Bible has one. It is the best vocation human beings can be offered — that is, participation in the divine plan for the universe.
The first question the Bible answers is, “Is there a God and what is God like?” This revelation permeates the Scripture, but it is not at all clear what the answer is right away. The Bible starts with the story of creation, in which God looks at the world and human beings and declares that they are “good.” But God has a definite vision for the world as it should be, and initially human beings don’t buy in to it. They want to go off on their own and do things their way. Hence the stories of the fall, Cain and Abel, Noah, and so on.
Finally, God picks what seems to be a random couple, Abraham and Sarah, and decides to work through them and their heirs. They are the first to respond to the universal human vocation: to follow a God they really do not know, to an unknown and unnamed foreign land, to do something that seems impossible. The rest of the Old Testament is really the story of Abraham and Sarah and their descendants struggling to fulfill that calling.
The New Testament, for Christians, is the story of one of those descendents, a Jew of the house of David, who claims to know the true nature of God and what God wants of all people. Jesus of Nazareth has some surprising answers to those questions. First, he claims intimate knowledge of God, calling him his “Abba” or “Daddy.” The Father, according to Jesus, is most like a loving, generous parent who wants only good things for the human race. God is understanding, forgiving, and supportive. This view of God was a big surprise to a lot of people at the time, who saw God as fearsome, judgmental, and even vindictive.
Jesus also had a definite idea of what this God of love wanted from us: to make the world more like the way a loving parent would have it. Jesus called this vision of the world as it should be “the kingdom of God,” and he apparently thought that it has already begun and would ultimately triumph “on earth as it already has in heaven.” These teachings were threatening to and rejected by most of the people of his time, but ultimately a small group — led by people like Peter, Paul, James, Mary of Nazareth, Mary of Magdala, and others — bought in to the mission and spread the message over the entire Mediterranean world.
In a nutshell, that’s what’s in the Bible, and its call to transform the world into the kingdom of God is what a lot of young people are looking for right now, even if they don’t know it.
3. The Bible must be broken open and scraped of barnacles for young people.
The problem is that most young people don’t read the Bible (or have it read to them). Its language is formal, stiff, “churchy,” and hard to understand for people coming of age in the 21st century. It has to be made to come alive for them for what it is — a road map for how to live a happy, fulfilled life.
I’ve done two things to try to help. First, I have learned from a few priests and others how to retell the Bible stories so they make sense to young people. Here is one example I use in talks I give to young people:
A man had two sons. He said to the first son, “Please mow the lawn for me before you go out.”
“Of course, Dad,” the son said. But then his friends pulled up in a car, and he jumped in and went off with them without mowing the lawn.
About a half hour later, the second son came down the stairs and the father said, “Please mow the lawn for me.”
“Aw, Dad,” the second son said. “I always have to do it. I did it last time. It’s my brother’s turn. Besides, I’m going out with my friends, and here they are just pulling up. I won’t do it.”
The second son then went out to his friends’ car, opened the door, and said to them, “Sorry, guys. I’ve got to mow the lawn for my dad. Pick me back up in 30 minutes.” Then he went and mowed the lawn.
Now, which of the two boys did what the father asked?
Young people get this story when I tell it this way. Then I tell them that Jesus told this to a bunch of people who were trying to trip him up, and when they answered correctly, “the second son,” Jesus immediately said to them, “You know, the prostitutes and politicians are entering the kingdom of God before you are.” Then we have a very rich conversation about why gentle Jesus would have said something like that to his critics, even after they had given him the right answer. The Bible is full of stories like this one. They just need to be retold by someone who believes them in language young people can relate to. I believe this is called preaching and teaching.
The second thing I’ve done to help is publish a new translation of the Bible. Yes, that’s right. My little publishing company, with a total of six employees, recently published a 2,000-page translation of the Bible in contemporary American English. It is called The Message: Catholic/Ecumenical Edition by Eugene Peterson, with the Catholic-recognized Deuterocanonical writings translated by William Griffin. This is not an “official” translation of the Bible, but it is an original translation from ancient languages that anyone can read and understand. (See the sidebars that accompany this article.)
The Message is a “reader’s” Bible. There are no footnotes in it. It will probably never be used at Mass or as a text for formal catechesis. But if it would get our young people to read the Bible and perhaps fall in love with it, wouldn’t it be worth trying? (The original, Protestant version of The Message has sold more than 16 million copies in various editions, many of them to young adults. But then, everyone knows that Protestants read the Bible and Catholics don’t. Hmmm.)
I’m sure many of you out there are having success in getting the Bible to come alive for young people. Let’s start sharing our experiences.
Gregory F. Augustine Pierce is the editor and copublisher at ACTA Publications in Chicago. He is a past president of the National Center for the Laity and a popular speaker and writer on faith in daily life. He and his wife, Kathy, a long-time Catholic middle school teacher, have three young adult children and are members of St. Mary of the Woods Catholic Church on Chicago’s northwest side.