Cherry picking verses and other pit falls when teaching students

I remember teaching students the first time that the story behind the the text affects the way we read the text. What I was doing was showing the students a simple text in Matthew: “…where two or more are gathered in my name, I am there with them.” That seems pretty clear and oddly enough most of them had heard that verse quoted at their church multiple times. So I asked them what does that verse mean? Their answer, “If two or more people gather then God is there, guaranteed.” So I asked, “When have you heard people quote this verse?” They said, “Usually when a gathering is small or if a gathering was larger than expected.” Then I asked them, “What if I’m by myself? What if I go into my prayer closet as Jesus tells us to do, is God there?” “Well, yes,” was their exasperated response. “So why do I need 2 or more?” They quickly tried to make sense of it but couldn’t. I suggested, “What if we are reading that verse out of context? What if it means something specific and we have applied it generally?” They were intrigued and ask for more. We finished our time by talking through Matthew 18 and read the verse in context. In the full context of Matthew 18, Jesus is telling us when you have to talk to a person about sin, he knew it would be hard for. us, but if you both come in humility to discuss it, he’s going to be there with you, guiding you and helping both of you. It has little to do with congregation size or attendance records.

CONTEXT IS KING...

I am notorious for questioning people’s assumptions about the text, because I can always tell when they’ve read it and wrestled with it and when they have simply picked parts they like in hopes of backing up what they want to believe. When we go hunting for verses to back up our already held beliefs, its called “Cherry Picking.” If you’ve ever been in an interpretation class or a hermeneutics class then you have most likely heard this idea. Picking and choosing the parts of the Bible that prove our points, no matter if they are in context or not is a big NO, NO.

The first thing you learn when reading scripture is that CONTEXT IS KING. What you are reading comes from a certain time and place, for a certain group of people, who occupy a specific sort of culture, and who the writer, speaker, or author had in mind when they shared these ideas. Many times in Youth Ministry we side step these ideas or at least believe the students would find that stuff boring.

What we seem to be trying to do is keep things simple. We think that too much history, too much language, too many nuanced points and we will loose our students. For some of us we always found that stuff a bit stuffy and can’t believe others would enjoy that kind of teaching. Maybe you have a point, but I think you just haven’t seen it done well. Others of you may feel like that diving into a passage is beneficial but you don’t have the bandwidth to make it happen, it would take too much time. That’s why a lot of us go to prewritten curriculum, we assume Orange or Grow or others have done that sort of research and we don’t have to do the research. I want to spend the balance of our time talking about how doing a well planned out dive into passages can bring the scriptures from Standard Definition into 4K and how spending time in the scriptures working out the lesson can transform your discipleship and ultimately your students.

Let’s talk first about this type of approach in Youth Ministry being “boring.” A lot of the times when we think about digging into the textual criticism or the linguistic criticism or the historical background of a passage, we think of academics. That sort of complex analysis is not for Youth Pastors but for scholars and theologians. I think if done properly this sort of approach can really interest your students. For many years Rob Bell (I know the stigma attached to him) and his partners made videos called Nooma. In them Bell dug into some very complex and scholarly approaches to the scriptures that students and Youth Pastors devoured. Now we may not be as cool as he was or as daring as he was, but we can pay attention to what these videos revealed to us: The Bible is an amazing book that is relevant to all people everywhere and when we present the ideas with a bit of creativity the complex approach can be intriguing. When we approach Biblical Studies as a thing to “suffer” through it will be boring, but when we approach it as a transformative text that is connecting the divine with humanity, then it will knock our socks off. Your heart, your passion, and your love for the scriptures will transfer to your lesson. You don’t have to be cool, you just have to be willing to take a chance, assume your students are smarter than you think, and willing to check out an ancient text with someone they trust.

When we cherry pick the verses we want for our lesson, we make the Bible become a device to prove we are right and everyone else is wrong. That does not transform, that is not interesting, and it may very well turn people off from doing any further research into the book.

Let’s talk about how we default to a way of teaching the scripture that seems easier to us: Third Party Curriculum. Now first off I am not advocating writing your own material all the time. I am aware of the demands on a Youth Pastor’s time. Sometimes you need to let a third party write good lessons you can trust so you have time to minister to families and individual students. However, it can be very easy to just go through the lessons, let the curriculum writers teach our

kids hoping they will catch something along the way.

When we cherry pick the verses we want for our lesson, we make the Bible become a device to prove we are right and everyone else is wrong.

I have many times used other curriculum like Grow and Orange to help me be concise, creative, and helpful. I am sure that if you have done the same thing you have read your fair share of lessons and thought, “This lesson is not good.” It may not be good because it is badly written, or it could be bad because your kids would not relate, or it may be bad because its pushing against your theology in a way that is not helpful. Either way you have noticed that the curriculum will not communicate and you end up rewriting it. This is the pitfall of using boxed curriculum, so you might as well just have done your own research and writing.

The other pitfall of this approach is getting lazy. You don’t care if its bad, its at least done, and you have so much to do you just need to check it off your list. The result is that your students are fed a view of the scripture that is not good, they can tell you are busy and that “lesson time” is just another obligation we have to do to be good Christians, rendering the Bible as an obligation to “suffer” through, no passion, no understanding, just a thing to check off your list. And we wonder why discipleship is not happening in our churches.

When we do this with the Bible we also find ourselves in a place that we really don’t want to be: being lazy about our theology. When we don’t adjust or at least question third party curriculum we feed our students a theology that we may not really believe. Evangelical Christianity is trying to be all encompassing, causing us to accept interpretations about scripture that we may in reality disagree with. Our faith is not homogeneous it is unique because we have wrestled with the scriptures. Many of us have come to similar conclusions and interpretations, thus creating something we would call orthodoxy, but when we make everyone conform to an “evangelical” doctrine we betray our own wrestling and inadvertently teach the students to just accept the interpretation without wrestling for themselves. Then when they realize that what they were taught is not Biblical or just not practical, they throw out the baby with the bathwater walking away from all of Christianity.

We have to start asking ourselves if we are trying to build a program or are we trying to make disciples? If we are trying to make disciples then its going to cost us something. We are going to have to sacrifice time and energy and possibly a wiz bang event for the sake of spending time in the scriptures with our students. If we share with them what the scriptures really say and don’t farm out interpretation to a third party, then they will see the wrestling we do and try it themselves. That’s the beauty of making disciples, they see how we have tried to follow Jesus and do the same.

Our faith is not homogeneous it is unique because we have wrestled with the scriptures.

N.T. Wright has a great illustration for reading scripture. He talks about seeing the Bible as a beautiful mountain landscape. We are amazed and awed by the beauty we see and want to get the fullest picture we can. Let’s then suppose you are looking at the landscape through a window in a cabin. You can see a lot of the landscape but are limited by the window. You could go to another window and see more, but you are still limited by the window’s frame. If you want to get a full picture you need to go outside the cabin and get a full picture without limitations. He used that illustration to make the point that reading scripture from a few verses is like looking out the windows but reading scripture from the perspective of a whole book or narrative arch is like walking out of the cabin to see the full landscape. I love that because that’s how I see digging in scriptures with students. Don’t feed them your denomination’s doctrine or the Orange’s theology, don’t think they will call it boring, instead answer their questions and challenge them to wrestle with the scriptures, better yet, show them how to use all the tools and resources at their disposal.