One of the most dangerous paradoxes in our discipleship of young people is that the more securely we seek to ground them in the faith, the more vulnerable we may be leaving them in the long run. This struck me a few months ago when I got to spend the day with one of my childhood heroes. I had spent a good proportion of my teenage years watching this guy on the television, both on the sports field and in his post-sporting celebrity status. As a student I had been wowed by him as he spoke to a packed room with an infectious passion for Jesus. I asked him about his faith and he disclosed that it had all but gone. I appreciated his honesty, but I was left feeling totally deflated.
My hero’s story was very similar to too many young people I have met. As a young convert he was nurtured by a brand of Christianity that came as a complete package with black-and-white theological (and political) positions on every subject under the sun. When he began to question one of those positions he was not just destabilised in that aspect of his faith, but his whole faith came crashing down.
What if the problem with our discipleship of young people is not that we don’t squeeze enough in but that we squeeze too much of the wrong stuff in? What if the problem is not just that we develop faith that is too shallow, but that we develop faith that is too narrow?
Economist Nassim Taleb coined the term ‘anti-fragile’ to describe a property of something that becomes stronger when chaos and disorder strikes. I would love to see young people developing not just a resilient faith, or a sticky faith that can survive when things get tough, but an anti-fragile faith, which actually deepens, broadens and thrives as they encounter new ideas, uncharted situations or even tragedy in their lives.
One way to help develop this kind of anti-fragile faith which has both depth and breadth is to deliberately tackle head on the many paradoxes of our faith, which currently lie outside of many of our discipleship programmes across the Church, leaving a legacy not only of unanswered questions, but an underlying message that these questions should not even be raised.
For the rest of this article we will explore five reasons why the paradoxes of our faith actually help us in the paradoxes of life and how tackling them head-on can make our disciple-making more effective in the long run.
1. No fear – open minded when facing challenges
I loved the way my PE teacher wanted my rough comprehensive school in Brighton to have a rugby team that could take on the public schools in our area. I was virtually blind without my glasses but could run fast, so was given the role of winger. He drilled us to fully commit to a tackle: hit the runner with all our might, grab on to their legs and hold on for dear life. A half-hearted tackle would certainly end up with a boot in the face - so we needed to go all in or not in at all, he said.
When it comes to exploring the Christian faith with our young people we need to have the same attitude. They are not afraid to tackle the hardest parts of the Bible, or raise the most difficult questions. Yet often we skirt around them for fear that we cannot offer them answers. However, because our contact time with young people is limited, deliberately focusing on the tough parts can be a good investment, building confidence in our young people that all of scripture really is Godbreathed, and developing the skills to handle any part of the Bible. Let’s learn to model an all-in attitude when it comes to studying scripture. We may not know or even discover all of the answers, but we can give it all we’ve got and show that these difficult questions won’t phase us. If we can help a young person to go beyond the more straight-forward lessons of, for example, Joshua, and wrestle with the paradox of the all-loving God who seems to command genocide, or beyond the simpler lessons of Abraham and wrestle with the paradox of the all-sufficient God who demands that Abraham kill his own son, then we add breadth to our discipleship. We also teach young people not to be afraid of critics such as Richard Dawkins.
2. No simple answers – open minded to mystery
Jamie Edwards, a 13 year-old schoolboy from Lancashire, recently became the youngest person ever to build a working fusion reactor. He created a ‘star in a jar’ using an online open-source recipe, his school’s under-used science lab and a £2000 grant that his head teacher invested in him. Reading his story made me wonder: what would 13 year-old Jamie be learning in youth group or Sunday school this weekend if he went along? We often underestimate the abilities of our young people and so give them a watered-down over-simplified understanding of faith which is geared more towards aspiring couch potatoes than aspiring rocket scientists. Rather than dumbing the message of the Bible down and giving bumper-sticker answers to challenging theological problems, I would like to see the bar raised and young people given the chance to access the riches and complexities of our faith.
Some aspects of our knowledge of God are difficult to grasp and we may need to re-visit even the most basic assumptions of our own faith in our quest for breadth and depth. When I was studying A Level physics, I was pretty sure I knew what light was. Then came my very first lecture at university. Professor Kemp, with his mad-scientist haircut, walked into a room full of expectant students in brand new gleaming white lab coats. To the palpable disappointment of everyone present, he proceeded to write Schrödinger’s very long equation on the board. It scared the living daylights out of us, as we were told to mentally throw away everything we had been taught about how light worked, and perform experiments that demonstrated contradictory things about light. Rather than take the easy route and ignore or discount one or the other set of data, we were shown that as scientists we were to take the humble route and acknowledge both truths, and accept that our brains are not big enough to understand the paradox they call ‘wave particle duality’.
If young people don’t wrestle with the paradoxes of God, their relationship with him could become stunted, warped or half-hearted
Similarly, when we say that Jesus is both fully human and fully God, or God is one and Trinity, or forgiving and just, it is not just nonsense, or a puzzle, or a play on words. We do not need to toss a coin, or hold a debate, or ‘ask the audience’ to decide between them. Both teachings are true, with neither being compromised. Learning to explore the paradoxes of God’s nature may be mindbendingly complex, but the end result is that we are left humbly in awe of a God who cannot be fully understood. Our young people should be given the opportunity to enjoy thinking hard about their theology and also to recognise the limits of our understanding that can in fact also inspire faith. Reflecting on the mysteries of God will help them in times when tragedies occur and there seem to be no answers except to trust a God whose ways are beyond ours, and who we can hardly begin to comprehend.
3. No boxes - open minded on secondary issues
Growing up in the 1980s, it was hard not to want to be Harrison Ford who landed the dream role in two of my favourite movie series. Firstly as Han Solo, clearly the coolest person in the Star Wars universe, and then Indiana Jones. One scene from the best of the Indy movies - Raiders of the Lost Ark - shows the Nazis transporting the Ark in a wooden crate with a Nazi insignia on the outside. When the camera pans out and the soldiers leave the Ark alone, we see the Swastika on the outside of the crate being burned away. The contents were bigger than the crate, the power greater than any badge. It made a deep impression on me. Director Stephen Spielberg was indicating that God’s power does not belong to any nation. God does not fit into a box.
There is a kind of Christianity that seeks to systematise God, to have a pre-prepared answer to every conceivable question or situation that its followers could pose. It is not hard to find Christian leaders who tell us exactly which political party to vote for, how to discipline our children, who should be the wage-earner in a household, why it is wrong to save the planet, which baptism is the only baptism that counts, and countless other subjects not stated specifically in the Bible. Buying into a brand of Christianity that comes as a complete and definitive package like this can, as we saw earlier, have a ‘house of cards’ effect when one of those views is challenged. Disciples of this kind of Christianity may end up with their entire faith being compromised. God cannot and will not be boxed in by our own specific cultural or political preferences.
However, if we never allow our young people to explore these practical and theological issues, they may end up failing to reconcile their faith with their everyday life. We want them to ask the questions about how they should vote, and bring up their children, and which kind of baptism is correct. So how can we encourage them to ask the questions, without falling into the trap of spoon-feeding them the answers that we may have decided upon for ourselves? How can we encourage them to be open-minded without, as GK Chesterton put it, being ‘so open-minded that [their] brain falls out’?
Exploring the paradoxes of scripture can help us as we are forced to distinguish between the things we can clearly understand from scripture that form the foundations of our faith, and other things that can be held loosely because scripture is less clear about them. These secondary issues will cause some tension as we wrestle not only with our own understanding and application, but as we accept others who may take a different view. Effective discipling means helping our young people wrestle with and differentiate between first and second order doctrines. Augustine put it well: ‘In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.’
4. No clones – open minded to disagreement
Even if we do not subscribe to a type of ‘packaged’ Christianity described above, there can still be a temptation for us as youth workers to turn our young people into a ‘mini-me’. We feed them the same books, courses and festivals that we enjoy and expect clones to appear at the other end of the sausage machine production line. There are teaching methods that are complicit in this. Let’s think about our last study – did we spend more time giving good answers ourselves, or encouraging them to ask good questions? Just as a good maths teacher withholds the answers to encourage the discipline of ‘working out’, so we should think twice before giving slick or pat answers to the complexity of the Christian faith.
Is it time to tweak our teaching methods to respond to a question with a question? What do you mean by that excellent question? What are the possible answers? What are the implications of that? Is this really what scripture teaches? To what extent is that biblical rather than cultural? What would it mean if I took that seriously in my life?
The paradoxes of scripture and Christian theology force us to answer questions with questions because they do not come with slick and pat answers. When Job came to God with the age-old problem of suffering, God refuses to answer him, despite letting future readers in on the secret of Satan’s wager. Instead God asks question after question forcing Job to think hard about whom he was trusting in the middle of his tragic circumstances.
Rather than giving hand-outs and hand-me- downs when it comes to theology, perhaps we should be encouraging wrestling and wrangling in a bid to encourage discernment and true discipleship of Jesus (as opposed to discipleship of the youth leader). This will inevitably lead to disagreements, but learning to disagree will stand them in good stead if we wish to see them stick with the Church.
5. No honeymoon – open minded towards the real God
I have heard people brag about their marriages claiming ‘we never argue’. This always concerns me – are these couples really connecting with one another? In any relationship it is as we connect that we inevitably clash, but those clashes mean that we get to know one another better and connect more deeply.
A conversation during one family Christmas gathering revealed that one of my female relatives left the shower running while she applied her hair and body products. Her husband was outraged at such a waste of water, as he always turned off the shower between rinses and assumed everyone else did the same. We had to laugh as they argued loudly over this, as they had been married for nearly 60 years at the time. Similarly it is when God surprises us that we know that we are connecting with him not just as an imaginary God, a Stepford God, or a puppet God who just does what we want, but as the real God with whom we are having a real relationship.
We long to see our young people having real encounters with the real God, and so by honing in on the parts of scripture that challenge us most, there is more chance that our young people will connect with him and become prepared for real life.
The Bible is full of incidents where his people clash with him, and we are often presented with apparent awkward paradoxes in his character. In scripture we meet a God who is both terrible and compassionate; offering mercy to Israel but genocide to the Canaanites. We meet a God who is both distant and present: calling the Israelites out of Egypt to be with him but keeping his distance in the Holy of Holies. The Bible is not afraid to show Jonah, Habakkuk, Moses, David, Peter and the other disciples complaining to God when they don’t understand him.
The puzzling nature of God makes him hard to always love, trust, honour and obey, and unless we are able to help our young people wrestle with some of these paradoxes their relationship with him could become stunted, warped or half-hearted. Conversely, it may be as they wrestle with them, that their understanding of who God is grows, and their relationship with him is strengthened.
If we are going to see young people thrive in their spiritual lives we need to help them go beyond the honeymoon period and enter a mature faith with a living God. We want to help them become open minded about discovering new depth and breadth in their faith, through wrestling with good questions rather than settling for easy answers and through testing the limits of their own cognition, delighting in encounters with the mystery of our complex God. Paradoxically, we may find that our own faith is deepened and broadened in the process.
Dr Krish Kandiah is executive director of churches in mission at the Evangelical Alliance and is founder and director of Home for Good. Krish’s new book Paradoxology: Why the Christian faith was never meant to be simple is out now.
