Double literacy loss, 2
A few more reflections following my previous post on the double loss of literacy in young people today: that is, the loss of ambient or default biblical literacy together with the loss of literal literacy, by which I mean the well-developed habits, eager interest, and requisite attention for sustained personal reading—of anything at all.
1. My main point had to do with evangelism and apologetics. Namely, clarifying a Bible young people are supposed to already know or introducing them to Jesus by means of close biblical study is not going to be the principal inroads for new conversions. They don’t know the Bible yet, and they lack any of the external conditions or internal habits necessary to come to know the Bible in a deep way through consistent deep private reading. If young people are going to come to the faith for the first time in the coming decades (that is, in our culture, the culture as it is, not some other culture at some other time in some other place), then most of them will not do so through Bible study.
2. My secondary point had to do with the role of personal Bible reading in young people’s daily spiritual lives, now and as they get older. There, too, I think our paradigm must change. They aren’t going to be super-readers, masters of the sacred page, the way our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers were. The days of the 82-year old church lady whose dog-eared pages of the KJV or NIV testify to her lifelong near-memorization of vast portions of Scripture—I’m not saying there won’t be any of them, I’m just saying that there will be fewer; and more to the point, the ambient culture that produced scores of them is no longer extant. The octogenarian wizard of the canon doesn’t appear fully-formed. She is the product of an extraordinarily concentrated and powerful formation from birth. Whereas what we are going to be dealing with, by and large, is either non-reading young people who’ve been raised in church but don’t know Achan from Abram from Adam from Absalom; or new converts to the faith who are beginning to live as disciples of Christ in their twenties or thirties—oh, and again, they don’t read in their spare time. Which means, as I say, that we must reimagine what role Scripture will and should play in their lives. If we don’t, then we’ll suppose they’re failures, since they’re not super-students of the word the way past generations were, all the while failing to equip them in the ways actually available to us.
3. None of this entails decentering Holy Scripture from the life of the church. To the extent that we take for granted that daily private Bible reading is synonymous with centering Scripture in the church’s life, we must realize that this is nothing more than an assumption, a contingent prejudice built on a particular historical moment and its attendant cultural conditions—none of which are universal, none of which are intrinsic to the faith. It’s time, as I said in the original post, to get to work rethinking how to be people, and how to train our youth to be people, of the word of God.
4. One route here is worship. Worship by definition ought to be drenched in the word of God through and through. If our young people are coming to church on Sunday, then we should see that time as our one, perhaps our only, opportunity to expose them to the truth and beauty and goodness of Scripture. So let’s not waste our chance. Let’s make sure they are hearing—hearing! I did not say opening their Bible and reading—long stretches of every part of the Bible read aloud: the Law, the prophets, the Psalms, the epistles, the Gospels, all of it. Trust the Spirit to do the principal work here. Let the word dwell in their and our midst. The sermon has a role, but it need not be anxious to explain (much less explain away) everything. The words are the vehicle of the Word. Let him do the work they’re meant to do: in this case, to elicit faith, to instruct, to edify, the convict.
5. Another route, then, is the sermon. And here is where my post dovetails with, rather than contradicts, a curious phenomenon these days. That phenomenon is the simultaneously decreasing and increasing length of sermons. Many churches I know have, over the years, slowly shrunk the sermon from 35 to 25 to 18 minutes or so. At the same time, I know of plenty of churches, and they are often communities that are “growing young” (i.e., attracting the 18-to-35 crowd), whose sermons stretch from 30 to 40 to 50 minutes long. Why? Precisely because they know the young people coming to worship do not know God’s word—so they provide it to them. The people are hungry, so these churches are feeding them. And the young people keep coming. Often the sermons are anti-pyrotechnic, even shockingly boring and tedious in their expository details. But starving people will eat anything; indeed, starving people know that what they need above all is sustenance. They’re not picky. Pastors and priests and preachers here see the opportunity: they are modern analogues to Ezra’s colleagues, walking among the people, giving the sense of God’s word, which on first hearing may be hard to grasp. If this generation’s literacy is doubly gone—few bits of Bible knowledge and fewer habits of private reading—then it’s the church’s job to give them the Bible, even if it’s from the pulpit for a full hour straight. Sounds to me like the leaders of these churches are being faithful missionaries to their context.
6. A third route is Bible class. Again, I want to be clear that my diagnosis of the double loss of literacy is not an excuse to cease, much less avoid, teaching the Bible to our children and young adults. It’s the opposite. It must begin, however, with the honest recognition not just that they don’t know the Bible already, but also that they are not, for the most part, going to engage in disciplined habits of sustained study of the Bible at home, in their daily lives. We’d have to nuke the internet from orbit for that to happen. So long as smartphones and social media dominate the attention spans of our young people (and our older adults as well), serious focused study of the canon among normie Christians is going to be the exception, not the rule. But once again, we have to wake up to the fact that any assumption otherwise is a historically exceptional one, distant from the ecclesial norm. Historically, most believers have been functionally illiterate and/or without possession of a personal pandect Bible. Where did they hear God’s word? In gathered worship. How did they learn about or study the Bible, if at all? In a room with other believers, under the wise guidance of a trusted teacher. So for today, and only more so in the coming years. That means reinvesting in Sunday school and Bible class, not discarding it as an artifact of bygone days. But the impulse to discard it is right insofar as “Sunday morning Bible class” suggests a group of Bible-knowing, physical Bible–carrying adult readers coming to church with very specific expectations for what study and learning means. Reinvesting in Sunday school therefore means reconsidering what it ought to look like going forward. Even our screen-addled youth can come to learn the broad story, the main characters, the central plot and subplots, the overarching themes, the fundamental doctrines of Holy Scripture. How we teach them these things, by what strategies, to what end—that is the question.
7. The singular error to avoid in coming to accept this double loss of literacy is the instinct to dumb down and de-biblicize both worship and church in general. What such an error looks like in practice is minimizing in the extreme all references to and exposition of Scripture. It means reducing the sermon to a brief talk and/or stripping it of depth and riches—not just a talk but a TED talk. It means ridding the service of both word and sacrament, so that worship becomes, in effect, one long concert. It’s true that plenty of young people will come for that. But if that’s all the church has to offer, there are better concerts than ours available out in the world. Eventually they will tire of the show. The church must be more than a show. Shoring up our celebration of word and sacrament, albeit in a register and in rituals and practices that show sensitive attunement to the circumstances and daily habits of the next generation: that’s the mission.
