The Bible According to Gen Z: Help Your Young People Enjoy Life with the Bible

By Adrian Blenkinsop

The essays and personal stories in this volume of BSA Essays explore one aspect of engaging youth with the Christian faith: personal Bible engagement. Bringing decades of wisdom in youth ministry, and leaning on significant original research by the Christian Research Association, the contributors present a positive message in some sobering tones. If Bible engagement is to grow among our youth, a lot will have to change. This book asks whether we are willing to make those changes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bible Society Australia
• Release date: Dec 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9780647518885

Book preview

Bible Engagement among Australian Young People

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Philip Hughes

Rev Dr Philip Hughes has been a senior research officer with the Christian Research Association since its foundation in 1985. He has postgraduate degrees in philosophy, theology and education, has undertaken many empirical studies in the areas of religion, values, and personal and communal wellbeing. For many years he was a research fellow at the Centre for Social Justice Research, Edith Cowan University. He is now an honorary research fellow at that university. He is also an honorary research fellow at the MCD University of Divinity.

One of the foci of his research has been the spirituality of young Australians. He was a member of the team which conducted the seminal ‘Spirit of Generation Y’ study between 2002 and 2008. In 2007, he wrote Putting Life Together: Findings from Australian Youth Spirituality Research.

Philip Hughes is ordained as a minister of religion within the Uniting Church in Australia. He has had 16 years pastoral experience in three churches: inner city, rural town, and suburban.

Research in Bible Engagement

In 2005, in a national telephone survey of a random sample of 1,200 young people across Australia, around 10 per cent of respondents said they read the Bible at least once a week, another 20 per cent read it occasionally, and 70 per cent never read it ¹. More recent surveys in schools suggest that the frequency of personal engagement with the Bible has fallen since then. In surveys of more than 8,000 students in 50 church-related schools, 6 per cent said they read the Bible often in the past 12 months, 23 per cent had read it at least once, and 71 per cent had not read it at all.

These surveys also showed a continuing declining in church involvement over recent decades. We estimate that only around 10 per cent of Australian secondary school students attend a church monthly or more often².

However, more than at any time in history, Australian young people are exposed to the Bible through schools. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics³, of all secondary school students in Australia, 39 per cent attend a non-government school. The vast majority of these schools are church-affiliated.. By far the largest group is Catholic, which currently educates close to 20 per cent of all Australian young people. The Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Seventh-day Adventists and Uniting Church all have large numbers of schools across Australia. There are also increasing numbers of parent-controlled or other conservative Christian schools. In most of these schools, religious education is a significant part of the curriculum and includes study of the Bible.

A few government schools also offer subjects such as Text and Traditions or Religion and Society in which there is also some study of the Bible. In primary schools, however, religious instruction in schools is given by volunteers from local churches. Most Christian religious instruction revolves around Bible stories.

Yet, talking with many Australian young people, one gets the impression that they have little idea what is in the Bible. In interviews I have conducted with young people in church-related schools, I have found young people highly articulate about topics such as religion and science, or the problem of evil, but much less articulate about the content of the Bible.

In 2010 and 2011, a group of organisations which included Scripture Union, Youthworks, the Lutheran Church and The Salvation Army (Southern Territory), led by the Bible Society, commissioned the Christian Research Association to conduct research into how young people personally engage with the Bible, the factors that serve to encourage or discourage engagement, and the catalysts for engaging with the Bible.

In seeking to understand the patterns of Bible engagement, we sought to contact a wide range of people who had some connection to a church, a youth group or voluntary religious group in church-related schools. There was little point in talking with young people who had no such connections and whom surveys tell us do not look at the Bible at all. We certainly found a wide range of attitudes to the Bible and a variety of patterns of engagement among the people we contacted that had some contact with a church or church-related organisation.

Some interviews were held within the normal meeting times of youth groups, and others before or after a church service. In several cases, a group of young people met with the researcher at the church at a pre-appointed time especially for the interview. About four interviews, each in different states, were organised for us by chaplains in schools. A couple of these were in church-run schools. A few interviews took place at a church organised café for young people without church connections. Several of the young people interviewed at the café had spent time in gaol and had had drug related problems. Both the school and the café provided another opportunity for meeting with young people who had little formal connection with a church, and gave us opportunity to explore a greater variety in patterns of Bible engagement.

We were careful to ensure that we talked to a wide range of young people in both rural and urban environments, recent immigrants and those who had been born here. We talked to young people from many denominations, including Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, Churches of Christ, Lutheran, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Salvation Army, Uniting Church and Wesleyan Methodist.

In total, we spoke to 60 groups of young people and 69 youth leaders. The total number of people participating in our conversations in these various contexts was about 333. Such numbers, and the fact they were not randomly selected, mean we cannot generalise from these interviews to make strong statements about the percentage of Australian young people who do this or that. However, they provide an excellent basis for identifying the range of attitudes to the Bible and the different patterns of Bible engagement, particularly among young people who have some connection to a church. The following section examines some of the factors that we identified that serve to either encourage or discourage young people from personally engaging in the bible.

Disincentives to Personal Bible Engagement

1. Church Practice

Many young people, including many who attend church, never consider reading the Bible personally and are not encouraged to do so by their churches. The Bible is certainly read in church services of all denominations and Bible passages are often the starting point for sermons and homilies. But that does not translate into encouragement to read the Bible at home, or to engaging personally with relating the Bible to life and society. Indeed, there is an implicit assumption in some denominations that it is not wise to read the Bible yourself as you may misinterpret it. Rather, there is an assumption that it should be read in the context of the Church community, and that the Church needs to provide the interpretation.

Attitudes to the study of the Bible have changed in recent years in the Catholic Church. Bible study is certainly regarded as an important part of the religious education curriculum in their schools. Yet, young Catholics rarely read the Bible personally. Most Catholics continue to focus on the community of faith as mediating the practices of faith, rather than these being discovered or developed through personal Bible reading.

In many non-evangelical Anglican and Uniting Churches, the measure of the commitment of faith is seen primarily in terms of people’s involvement in the life of the church and in activities contributing to social justice and the welfare of others, rather than in terms of personal devotion. In Pentecostal churches, there is a lot of emphasis on the Bible, but one’s personal experience of God is, in practice, regarded as even more important.

One large Pentecostal Church where we spoke to youth leaders and young people had a section on its website providing a guide for daily Bible readings. Nevertheless, in practice, young people were more encouraged to experience God in their lives than to find God through reading the Bible. In a world where personal experience is seen as the ultimate authority, young people tend to look for ‘what works’ for them.

That approach to life has an impact on their attitudes to the Bible. Two young Christians, respectively female and male, explained their attitudes in the following terms. "There are other ways of being