A Missing Ingredient in How we Teach the Bible to the Next Generation
I’m an aspiring pizza chef. What I mean by that is that I’ve spent a few hours watching various YouTube videos about making pizzas. I’m not an actual pizza chef (yet), but my vast and extensive research has taught me that the magic of pizza is all in the crust.
What kind of flour do you use for your dough? Better be ‘00’ flour. How much yeast do you add in? How do you roll out the dough to get those nice air bubbles that make for the perfect bite? What temperature are you cooking at in your oven? Pizza stone? Gas pizza oven? No. You’re more of an artisanal pizza person. You use a wood-fired oven. Ah, yes… recovering the primal way that pizza was supposed to be made.
One of the first times I made my own pizza at home, I made a terrible mistake. I don’t have a wood-fired pizza oven (yet), but even that wouldn’t have saved me.
I forgot to add salt to the dough. The crust, which I would remind you is where the magic is, was bland and dense. So not only was it flavorless, but it was so dense that it took a LONG time to chew. In other words, every bite was a dreadfully long reminder of how bad I was at making pizza.
Salt. One ingredient. If I had just remembered the salt… Ok, so maybe there’s more to improving my pizza game than just remembering the salt, but bear with me for the sake of the metaphor.
Children and teens who are raised in the church hear no shortage of Bible stories. We have Bible apps for kids, Sunday School, youth groups, and all sorts of other great resources. All of these are wonderful and I’m grateful for them!
While many kids who have grown up in the church could tell you a fairly accurate summary of the story of Daniel in the Lion’s den, few can tell you why Daniel, a Jewish boy, is living under the rule of a non-Jewish king, in a city far away from his homeland. Or whether Daniel and the Lion’s den comes before or after David and Goliath.
In other words, while many of our kids and teens have a decent mental library of individual Bible stories, the majority do not have an overall sense of how all those stories work together to tell one big story.
Think of it like this. If individual stories in the Bible were like cities in the United States, then the Bible as a whole would be the entire map. You have your more well-known cities like Miami or Dallas, just like you have your more well-known stories like Noah’s ark and the feeding of the 5,000. You also have your lesser-known cities like Clewiston and Midlothian, just like you have your lesser-known Bible stories like the stories of Mephibosheth and Zerubbabel.
Our primary method of teaching in the church is to read one of the stories of the Bible, explain its meaning, and apply it to our lives. This is good and right. We should not stop doing this… but we are forgetting the salt.
We also need ways of teaching and summarizing the entire map. We need to hold up the big picture storyline so that we can understand how all of Scripture works together as a unified whole. Bible stories, like cities in the US, are not all islands unto themselves. They are connected to other stories and dependent on the events that took place before them and are affecting the events that will take place after them.
Most of our Bible study tool belts have a magnifying glass at the ready for those moments of deep reflection on a few verses. God’s Word is like an endless well of truth and beauty. We need a magnifying glass approach if we’re going to fully appreciate the treasures of wisdom in the Bible.
But we also need a wide-angle lens in our tool belts as well. We need to be able to zoom out and take a look at the entire map, noticing how this story is setting up the need for that story, and how this other story towards the end is picking up on themes from another story in the beginning.
Further, knowing the big picture storyline helps us to retain and internalize each individual story. If our minds were filing cabinets, having a sense of how the metanarrative of Scripture works creates the major file tabs that enable us to organize the stories of the Bible in their proper place. Then, like a well-organized filing cabinet, our minds are able to recall and reference the details of individual stories with greater effectiveness and accuracy.
If we’re honest, as great as that sounds, it’s also overwhelming. How can we present the story of the entire Bible when it’s so massive and ancient? There are 1,189 chapters and over 30,000 verses in our Bibles. What tools can we use to get a sense of how it all works together to point us to the Good News of Jesus Christ?
These are the questions that we’ll tackle in the next post! Cliffhanger. I know. But think of it this way. Now you have time in between posts to watch a couple of YouTube videos on how to make great pizza. But please remember… don’t forget the salt.
