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Engaging With God's Word To Us
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Wednesday,
30 August, 2006
Pauline, your life always sounds like one long journey around the world. Where have you been travelling to in 2006?
Mostly the continent of Africa. In January, with the magnificent support of SU South Africa, SU International held a fourth Senior Staff Development Course near Cape Town. I’m part of the planning group and training team, led by BIRC Regional Secretary, David Bruce. This year I particularly enjoyed organising the translation service into French, Spanish, Russian and Chinese. It was excellent to have Rosie Marjoram with us from Scotland – one of a lively group of women delegates who added spark to the mix! In May I was back in Africa for two training and support trips to our movements in Madagascar and Angola and a meeting in Johannesburg of the Forum of Bible Agencies International Task Force on Bible engagement in the context of HIV/AIDS.
The travel is a mixture of privilege and occasional stress! It really is a privilege to visit interesting places and spend time with God’s people there. I have also visited Thailand this year and will be heading east again in the autumn to India, Pakistan and Nepal.
Can you explain a bit about how SU International is seeking to help young people engage with the Bible?
To answer this question properly, I need to go back a little to September 2005. At its annual meeting the SU International Council adopted as its basis for work a document called the SUI Global Mission Strategy. This was the main outcome of a two-year strategic review of SUI activities and it outlines our responsibilities in two directions. The first is to encourage the health and lively development of existing SU movements in their mission calling. The second is to help the development of new ministry – either appropriate new models of our traditional ministries, or work in new places – perhaps especially in those parts of the world often called the ‘10/40 Window’.
The five of us on the SUI staff team don’t work directly with young people and the Bible (though we probably all keep our hands in as volunteers in our churches or in our SU movements!). Our role is to keep the movement committed to training, to constant reflection on how we do things, to research (though we’re weak in this area) and to working together with others when this will make us more effective.
Why do you talk about “Bible engagement” rather than about reading the Bible?
One reason is that not everyone in our world can read or chooses to read. We surely want to be inclusive and welcoming, rather than talking about activities (like Bible reading) that may make some people feel we have nothing for them. Because SU has traditionally worked with children and young people in school, we have tended to forget the masses of young people and adults who are not literate. For example, in both the countries in Africa I visited in May, Angola and Madagascar, the adult illiteracy rate is 63%. Even the UK rate is 38.4%!
But just as importantly, along with other Bible agencies, we are deeply challenged about the fact that availability of the Bible and even reading of the Bible, does not mean that there will be any observable impact of the Bible in people’s lives. Bible engagement implies interaction with God’s Word between a person or a community that has outcomes in terms of transformation – a process of becoming more like Jesus in words, actions and attitudes. It is letting the Word of God truly have authority over us, so that we do what we know.
Thirdly, ‘engagement’ implies the involvement of the whole person is encountering God’s Word. Our ability to reason is important in developing faith and understanding Scripture. But so is our capacity to imagine andto feel. SU movements around the world are developing some exciting experience-learning approaches to Bible discovery that bring together life and Word in powerful ways. I think for instance of Naomi Swindon of SU Victoria who takes teenagers around the city of Melbourne, reading passages from Mark’s Gospel that take on contemporary meaning in the business centre, the red-light district, the ‘urban priority’ areas, the cathedral, old people’s homes etc.
If children read less, do we need to work harder at using new media?
Yes, we do, but with care. I’ve noticed over the last few years that there is a tendency to invest all the creative energy in the actual medium (MP3, websites etc) but do rather superficial work with the Bible text. One of the distinctives of SU’s approach to the Bible is that we believe in helping people to discover its impact and implications for themselves. This is why nearly all our Bible guides, and especially those for children and young people, include questions to help people to explore for themselves. The Internet offers superb new possibilities for developing this dimension, but more often than not, our websites simply offer pages of text with little or no facility for interaction. Some of the MP3 resources I’ve listened to lately are also very ‘flat’, offering ready-made answers and prescriptions, rather than intriguing young people with the richness of Scripture.
SU also needs to exploit the visual dimensions of exploring the Bible. In Australia Naomi Swindon has developed a tool called ‘Images of Jesus’ as a discussion starter with young people. It leads them eventually into opening their Bibles and actually exploring the text – but only through a process that starts with bringing together their own story with the story of Jesus through a series of images. People often find it much easier to respond to and talk about pictures than they do about text. As a movement with its roots in schools, we need to be aware of our need to develop non-text approaches.
So how do you think we can we help primary age children in Scotland to engage with Scripture?
There’s no single answer to this, but I believe an example of good practice from SU New Zealand can give us some clues. Andrew Ramsbottom runs primary age camps. A regular feature of the programme is the reading aloud to the children of chapters of the Bible as if they were chapters of Harry Potter or the Narnia Chronicles. Andrew reports that a significant number of the children go off to their cabins or tents after the reading and continue on in the next chapter – they want to know what happens next!
Taking seriously the narrative character of the Bible is very important in our work with primary age children (and indeed any age). We have been too quick to boil down the complex and multi-layered Bible stories into ‘principles’ – and principles are not memorable. Jesus told stories – and he rarely stayed around to say, ‘And the moral of this is…’! He mostly left people to think it through for themselves.
Introduce primary children to a wide range of biblical literature – don’t serve them a narrow diet of the Gospels only. I’m concerned when I see holiday activity programmes and holiday Bible club materials that never stray outside Matthew, Mark, Luke and - perhaps - John. The Good News for children starts with Genesis and creation and ends with Revelation and the hope of creation restored!
Read two key books about children and the Bible. One is the not-at-all-new but still excellent The Adventure Begins: a Practical Guide to Exploring the Bible with Under-12s, by our very own Terry Clutterham, (Scripture Union 1996). The other is Ivy Beckwith’s Postmodern Children’s Ministry: Ministry to Children in the 21st Century (Youth Specialties, Zondervan, 2004) – lots here to make us think about how we’re going about our children’s work!
Last, but most important of all, saturate with prayer every encounter between children or young people and God’s Word. Only God’s Spirit – not our creativity or knowledge or experience – can bring about something life-changing.
And what about when young people get to secondary school age? How can we help then?
At this age, I think young people need the help of a community to encourage and strengthen their commitment to listening to God in his Word. I find it so interesting that every year the Taizé Community in France attracts thousands of young people to live together, pray and meditate on Scripture. In our seemingly secular and pleasure-seeking culture, retreats are more and more popular, as are pilgrimages to places like Iona and Santiago de Compostela. Perhaps SU needs to consider anew form of holiday activity in the shape of pilgrimages or retreats, with silence and contemplative listening to Scripture as its focus. Journeying and pilgrimage are models for the Christian life that many young people find helpful and attractive today.
As a movement in Scotland, do you think there are ways that we can make the Bible more central to all of what we are doing?
As I’ve said above, I think we need to stop thinking about the Bible separately from the God who communicates with us in the Bible. This is his book, his story, his Word to us, our primary place of encounter with him, where he spreads out his vision for a magnificent kingdom of justice and righteousness and invites us to participate in bringing it in and making it a reality. (On this theme do read N T (Tom) Wright’s Scripture and the Authority of God. SPCK 2005 – a key text for every SU staff member and volunteer!)
So this question is really asking, ‘How can we make God’s thinking more central to all of what we are doing.’ It’s a good question! Perhaps the answer is to have a wider kingdom vision that goes beyond personal conversion at camp or in a school group to the unending possibilities of community transformation that could come about as SU school groups join with churches and others, in order to be, in the words of SU International’s mission statement ‘servants of a world in need’.
There is currently a strong sense for us at SU Scotland of needing to pray for Scotland’s young people. Can you make some suggestions about how we should be praying in relation to this issue of engaging with the Bible?
First of all, I think we can actually ‘pray the Word’ for the young people of Scotland. That is, pray through our Scripture text with young people in mind, holding them before God in the light of the day’s reading.
Beyond that, I remember David Clark, the previous General Director of SU Scotland, saying, ‘Why is the Bible such a rich resource for ministry with young people? Because it provides them with words for every situation they encounter.’ Scripture is grittily realistic about family life (think of Joseph, of Jacob and Esau), about the pressures on young people to succeed, about work and leisure, the search for identity, the longing for intimacy, sexuality, success and failure, power and weakness, joy and sadness, fear and freedom. We should pray that our young people will discover the richness of Scripture, be encouraged to struggle with its puzzles and above all be intrigued life-long with its central character.
But for this to happen, we may need to encourage them to do some ‘off-road driving’ through parts of the Bible that we tend not to consider in our ministry with young people. The bleak existential questions of Ecclesiastes, the outspoken grief of Lamentations, the frankness of the Song of Solomon, the humanity of the Psalms can all speak deeply to young people. In his research project, Fergus MacDonald has been discovering that the Psalms, with their ‘raw spirituality for an irreverent age’ have an extraordinary power for young people, with these needs and values:
• want to have a good time
• want to be well thought of
• want to resolve pain
• suspect institutions
• value experience highly
• engage with ambiguity
And how can we pray for you and support you in your role as International Bible Ministries Coordinator?
My own prayer for SU movements around the world, and their engagement with the Bible, is the one Paul prayed for the Colossian church (Colossians 3:16): ‘Let the word of God dwell in you richly…’ It’s the theme text for our International Week of Prayer in November. Please pray that I may know how best to serve the movement to develop a wider vision for Bible ministries and to enjoy a rich, rich experience of the Word of God.
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Want to discuss any of the issues raised in this article?
Contact Andy Bathgate by email: andy@suscotland.org.uk
You can also contact Pauline Hoggarth by email: paulineh@su-international.org
Scripture Union Scotland, 2006
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