The passages I’d rather not talk about

When I was in college, I had the general idea that there was no passage of scripture that I couldn’t interpret. After all, I was attending THE Moody Bible Institute. I was taught all the methods that I would need to look at any part of scripture, find relevant commentaries, do my research, and come up with the right answer.

Since starting in ministry, I have seen how difficult some passages are to teach. It is one thing to find a satisfying answer to interpretive questions for personal study, or even academic writing. It is something else entirely to try and communicate something meaningful about it to a group of adolescents.

Often, then, I end up avoiding or dodging tough passages for any of the following reasons:

they just won’t understand

In my first year of youth ministry , I dodged my first challenging passage. We were going through Judges, and I had a younger group, and I simply didn’t want to try and explain a concubine being raped to death, cut up, the pieces sent to the twelve tribes of Israel, and the subsequent male-genocide of the tribe of Benjamin.¹ It isn’t as if I feel uncomfortable with that passage – I think it is a visceral, but accurate, picture of what happens when, as Judges says, “everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” I just wasn’t sure they would be able to get past the graphic content in order to get the meaning of the text. So we ended our study of Judges after Solomon.

The approach then was to keep them from passages that would just take too much work to explain. In honesty, I haven’t completely left this approach behind. Sometimes it is the right approach – we won’t be doing any in depth studies of Song of Solomon any time soon – but more often than not it is an undervaluing of my students’ ability to wrestle with difficult passages.

they aren’t going to like the answer

Sometimes I have dodged passages because I was pretty sure that the response from students would be negative. That either because of harshness, or because of a misunderstanding, or because of a nuanced reading that they aren’t able to put together – they’ll read a passage and then want to throw the whole thing out.

And say what you want about my lack of willingness to stand for capital “T” Truth – an uncomfortable reality of youth ministry is that it can feel as if there is an element of salesmanship involved. If what I say is not engaging or favourable, the students will stop coming. Or tune out. I don’t like it, but it is something I have to face. Unlike adults, whose attendance is almost exclusively voluntary, youth often have some degree of external coercion related to their attendance. It doesn’t mean that they are uninterested in learning from you, but it does mean that while they are learning from you, they are doing so at a point in their lives where they are evaluating the church and choosing whether or not the faith handed to them is one they plan on making their own.

Perhaps that is a question that I wrestle with too much. But, when it comes to tough passages, I occasionally find myself shying away from content that might introduce doubts of questions, or even be a tipping point for one of my students in rejecting faith altogether. It may seem neurotic, but I have had active students almost immediately leave the church once they heard an offhand comment from another student about our church’s stance on sexuality. At the same time, if I am teaching them a sanitized, safe Christianity, I will have given them a lie.

I don’t have the answer

Sometimes I dodge a text because I myself don’t know what to do with the passage. It isn’t a matter of being unable to understand what the commentaries say. Sometimes you read all the commentaries you want and the answers just don’t feel satisfactory. When Paul suggests that women should keep their heads covered “because of the angels” in 1 Corinthians, or when the dead rise and walk around after Jesus’ crucifixion in Matthew, or when God insists that nursing children have to be killed in the promised land – I don’t know what to say. Sometimes the passages are odd, sometimes they are (at face value) disturbing. Sometimes I don’t teach about things because I don’t know what to teach.

why this is all really, really bad

My guiding metaphor for youth ministry is that of an internship. That you have to give students skills to use, and then opportunities to test out those skills. In a setting where it is safe to fail, where learning how to be a Christian is more important than simply checking off theological boxes to prove that they are Christians. If they aren’t given the chance to do the work of wrestling with scripture on their own, they will end up wrestling with it on their own after they leave our group. They are going to be thrown into the deep end – I’d just like to be there to help them stay afloat when it happens. Of course we hope that students will go to college (or whatever path they choose post high school) and get involved in a church where they can continue to wrestle with the text in community. But with the work of individuation happening in these Middle School and High School years, it seems to me that it makes sense to help them out these skills of interpretation as a part of that identity formation. And when I dodge the tough passages, I am telling them they have to build those skills of interpretation on their own.

So what do I do now?

I still dodge texts, sometimes. It is hard work to get into the mud and wrestle with the parts of scripture that are tough to interpret. But I am working on modeling for my students. Modeling that when texts tell us something challenging, we can’t just reject or ignore them. I am trying to model that when a passage is confusing, we look at it and struggle with it. I try to model that when a passage seems to fly in the face of what we think about God, we look at other texts to help inform, and we sometimes have to sit in a little bit of mystery and tension. Sometimes commentators wrap up the texts in neat little packages that seem too easy. Too simple. And I want to make sure my students aren’t moving into their adult lives of faith assuming that the Bible has easy answers to everything.

This is a much messier way to do youth ministry. Is is far simpler to just avoid hard passages, or give them concise answers to every question they could ask. And showing them the tough parts of scripture may introduce doubt into their lives where there wasn’t any before. And, I assure you, I take Jesus’ words about causing little ones to stray very seriously. But I also take very seriously James’ words about teachers being judged more harshly – and I believe that when I dodge or oversimplify those passages of scripture that are difficult to read, I will have to answer for it.