Kyle McKinnon
We had been building up to this for 18 months: young people who were willing to stay after school to talk about God, nodding their heads in agreement as I taught, seeing and sharing about their own bad choices, and believing Jesus was who I proclaimed. When I gave the invitation to invite Jesus into their lives, four responded, “Absolutely!”
But, as they responded, my heart sank. Deep down I knew they were not signing up to take up their crosses. I anticipated they were not willing to risk everything to follow Jesus. They were agreeing with my argument without any life commitment. I questioned if the thing that had changed most in their lives were full stomachs from the biscuits I had brought along. I wondered what had gone wrong.
I had become a missionary to the UK because I wanted to invest my life in a post-Christian, post-modern generation. It still amazes me that for many of the teens I meet on the street or mentor in the school, I am the only person they know who actually has a life affected by a belief in Jesus. While this is exciting, it has also forced me to retool. The way I was trained to approach evangelism and discipleship just wasn’t effective.
On that day, and after several others like it, I began a journey to find out how to really help young people begin the new life that Jesus talks with Nicodemus about in John 3. Enthusiastic agreement with my gospel presentation was not enough. A key tool in that journey was a book a friend gave me, Live to Tell by Brad Kallenberg.
Live to Tell proposed a reason why the young people were not able to engage and make life changing decisions upon the information that I had been giving. Being post-modern they could accept me and my story and even agree with it, and being post-Christian they were unable to attach personal meaning to the Biblical concepts I was sharing. This book helped me understand why.
For many years I had been working to lose my Christian jargon, but contrary to current thought, Kallenberg claims we need to help people learn to speak Christian. He says, “Put simply, conversion involves the acquisition of a new conceptual language. Scientist-cum-linguist Benjamin Whorf made the observation that in order to understand the world we must already be skilled in a language because we use language to think” (39).
I see now when I was speaking to these teenage kids about faith, they were unable to connect their hearts and minds with what I was saying. Although I was speaking English, I was speaking about a subject for which they had no understanding in so many ways. I could have been speaking German and talking about a Volkswagen van for all they knew. This shouldn’t have surprised me. When one of my friends starts talking about the complexities of World of Warcraft online role-playing game, I glaze over too. I know he is talking about a game and he cares about it, but I have no idea what he is talking about. I lack the conceptual understanding.
If young people are choosing to reject God, are they rejecting Him because they are rebellious in their hearts towards Christ, or are they rejecting Him because they are unable to engage with the conceptual ideas I am speaking? If there is even one who is rejecting the offer of God because I am speaking Christian and they don’t understand words like: grace, forgiveness, repentance, sacrifice, atonement, etc. then I need to change tactics. I am challenged because I have grown up in a place where using Christian language has worked. Look at the Simpson’s. Some of their best jokes are funny because our culture still possesses a Christian conceptual language. The only reason the Flanders are a funny family is because enough people have either been part of a church or are a part of that family.
I don’t believe I can change a rebellious heart, but I can change the way I communicate about God to the people I live around. The challenge is to help them conceptually understand ideas-ideas I have grown up with to such an extent I don’t even realize the concepts are Christian in origin. This is where Kellenberg has given me direction. He shares two ways that we can help people learn to speak Christian, giving them a conceptual language.
The first way: “…fluency is gained by participating in the linguistic community’s form of life-the weave of activity, relationships, and speech that gives the community its unique personality” (41). He uses the word chair metaphor. The word chair has meaning only as we sit in it, move it around, and paint it. Merely defining a wooden device that allows you to not stand doesn’t bring the same understanding.
We can develop that idea with key ideas about God such as forgiveness. Young people can better decide if they need, want, or can be forgiven when they are part of a place that forgives-not only their friends and families but their enemies too! When they are, the word forgiveness has meaning they could not understand through a mere definition. I believe the claim young people make that God is irrelevant to their lives will be quickly confronted when God concepts and expressions are a part of their activity, speech, and relationships.
The second method shared by Kellenberg uses interpretive stories. Interpretive stories are stories that give meaning to a concept. When I disciple teenagers I teach them concepts such as how to pray, how to read your Bible, how to avoid pre-marital sex, etc. I tell them why those concepts are important and then share with them verses that back them up. However, because many of the teenagers we work with come from non-Christian homes, they have not seen these concepts lived out. This where interpretive stories can help to bring definition to these concepts, and the Bible is full of graphic, interpretive stories. For example, I have done many talks with the young people I work with on why abstinence is best. I have shown them passages that talk about avoiding adultery. But, the next time I teach we will look into the stories of the Bible that abuse sex: Tamar, Dinah, David, to name a few. Then they will see and feel the devastation of sexual immorality. That will give them a meaningful picture of why sex outside of marriage is wrong and hurtful.
Neither do I believe the stories need to be only Bible stories. God is continuing to describe Himself to our world through our stories, and as we share them we take major steps forward in helping un-churched young people see who God is and what the words follower of Him really mean.
We want to see young people across England enter into a relationship with Jesus and then grow so close to Him that their friends become Christ followers as well. However, before we can help them follow Him, we have to keep doing the hard work of teaching them the vocabulary of God. It is when they understand that language with their minds they can decide in their hearts if they want to move closer to the Savior.
Kallenberg, Brad. Live To Tell. 2002. Print.
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