Is Boring People with the Bible a Sin?
THE SHOCK ABSORBER
Jim Rayburn, the founder of Young Life, the father of modern youth ministry, and the man who launched a revolution in how the church thought about reaching young people, said it was a sin to bore a kid with the gospel. His instinct, that faith had to be culturally engaged, relationally warm and genuinely interesting, shaped everything that came after him.
He wasn't wrong. But somewhere between his insight and today, something went sideways.
The response to the fear of boring young people was to make faith simpler. More accessible. More culturally relevant. Strip out the complexity, find the analogies, meet kids where they are. And in the process, a generation of young people ended up with a faith so simplified it couldn't hold up when real life arrived.
There's a better way. And it starts with understanding the difference between simplifying and distilling.
The Suitcase Handles on Your Kids' Faith
The distinction comes from a new book called How to Teach Kids Theology by Sam Luce and Hunter Williams. Simplifying, they argue, is fighting to remove as much complexity as possible, getting down to the fewest possible parts, making things as easy as the audience will allow.
The problem is that when you simplify something, you can end up removing complexity to a point where you also remove what is essential, ending up with something that is easy to understand but no longer true, or at least no longer the whole truth.
Distilling is different. Distilling keeps the essentials and removes the unnecessary. It produces something that is bite-sized and accessible, but hasn't lost the truth in the process. It's concentrated, not diluted. You can hold it. You can carry it. And you can grow into it rather than grow out of it. They helpfully say:
When you distill truth and avoid simplifying, you put suitcase handles on your kids' faith that they can take with them wherever they go.
Tim uses the Trinity as his test case. When we try to simplify the Trinity for children, by saying something like it’s ice, water and steam or it's like the three parts of an egg, we end up with analogies that are easy to grasp but that, if you follow them to their logical conclusion, produce heresies that the early church spent centuries arguing against. The H2O analogy leads to modalism. The egg analogy leads to partialism. The simplification hasn't helped, it's pointed people in the wrong direction.
His preferred approach: tell kids the Trinity is genuinely hard to understand. One plus one plus one equals one. Do you get it? No? Neither do we. That's distillation. It's accurate, it's honest, it's accessible, and it hasn't lost the truth by trying to make it easy.
Why Lee Strobel Became a Teen Atheist
As a young teenager, Lee Strobel was asking the big questions. Why is there suffering? How could a good God send people to hell? He brought those questions to the adults around him and couldn’t get satisfying answers.
Nobody could engage with what he was actually asking. So he moved on, to Darwin, to evolutionary theory, to a university professor who told him the Bible couldn't be trusted. By the time he finished his education he was a committed atheist.
His return to faith came not through apologetics but through his wife. She became a Christian. He watched her change. He couldn't explain it. So he decided, as a journalist, to build the case against Christianity, and found he couldn't do it. The evidence kept pointing in the wrong direction. In 1981 he became a Christian.
What's striking about Strobel's story is that the unanswered questions didn't make him an atheist. They opened a door. The lack of engagement with those questions, the adults who couldn't or wouldn't answer them, or who tried to reassure him without actually responding to what he was asking, created a vacuum that other ideas filled.
This is the failure of simplification. When you tell a curious young person not to worry about the hard questions, you're not protecting their faith. You're telling them that the hard questions don't have answers.
The History That Got Us Here
Stu traces the arc from the 1950s to now as a useful map for anyone trying to understand how the church arrived at its current relationship with youth culture.
Jim Rayburn's instinct in the 1950s was essentially right: young people needed a ministry that met them where they were, that took their culture seriously, that was genuinely relational. He moved youth ministry away from formal church programs, created club models with games and music and humour, pioneered Christian camping, and insisted that the starting point was the young person's world rather than the adult church's expectations.
The syncretism that followed, the attempt to make the gospel as culturally resonant as possible, produced some extraordinary ministry. Pete Ward in the 1980s wearing jeans to earn the right to be heard by punks. Mark Senter exploring a more pluralised, contextualised approach to youth ministry in the 1990s. A genuine incarnationalism that took seriously the call to become all things to all people.
But it also produced some problems. Cultural relevance that was specific to a particular moment doesn't age well.
The apologetics wave of the 1990s and 2000s saw a generation of scripture teachers and youth leaders prepared their best answers to the new atheist questions: evolution, Genesis, the reliability of the Bible, the problem of suffering. Those answers were genuinely helpful for young people who were asking those questions.
But the questions have changed. Stu is now hearing from scripture teachers who open classes by saying, "I'm going to explain what happened to the dinosaurs" and finding that the students don't particularly care. The new atheism that shaped that apologetic framework has receded. The young people sitting in classrooms in 2026 have grown up in a post-new-atheist world, shaped by different questions and different pressures.
And many of them have never heard the gospel at all. They didn't grow up in Sunday school. They don't have the residual Christian framework that previous generations carried even when they drifted from faith. They're starting from scratch.
And when simply presented with the gospel, the story of creation, the fall, Jesus dying and rising, the invitation to be forgiven and redeemed, they listen. The story is new. The direct presentation is working again.
The Wall of the Swimming Pool
A parenting author who describes the parent's role with a questioning, pushing teenager as being like the wall of a swimming pool. Kids push off against you. Your job is not to move. Your solidity, your non-anxious presence, your refusal to be destabilised by their pushing, that's what gives them the psychological safety to keep coming back when they have more questions.
Tim's daughter is reading through Genesis and when she noticed that the word Satan doesn't appear in Genesis 3 she asked why everyone assumes it's Satan. That started a long conversation about the history of spiritual beings in the Old Testament, the Bible Project, the complexity of the text. She also accused him, at one point, of having lied to her in children's ministry. He didn't think he had — but the conversation was evidence of exactly the right thing happening. The distilled faith she'd been given as a child was now being rehydrated. The foundation was solid enough to build on.
Stu's recently walked into a service station and found his path blocked by a group of Year 8 and 8 kids on e-bikes, huddled in the aisle in a way that was semi-deliberately obstructive. The kind of thing teenagers do when they're daring an adult to push back. When he said excuse me and asked them to let him through, one of them responded with something dismissive with a tone designed to provoke a reaction.
He didn't give them one. He smiled, waited for them to move, said thanks, went to the counter, came back. Said have a good day, love the bikes.
And he watched something shift in the kid's face.
That's not a gospel conversation. It's not a moment of profound ministry. But it's the thing that has to come first, the non-anxious adult presence that doesn't collapse or lash back when a teenager tests it. The wall that doesn't move. The thing that makes the teenager think, even briefly: this is different.
The question is never how to stop them pushing. The question is whether the walls are solid enough that the pushing is productive.
Distil, Don't Simplify
Top down: be really careful about how you communicate with young people. Distil, don't simplify. The faith you give them needs to be robust enough to survive contact with real life, to survive the unanswered questions, to survive the evolution class and the sceptical university professor and the season of doubt that is simply part of normal human development. Put suitcase handles on their faith. Give them something they can carry through every cultural shift that comes.
Bottom up: listen. Give young people the honour of being image bearers of God who have something to teach you. The non-anxious adult presence isn't just a technique for keeping teenagers close, it's a genuine posture of respect toward people who are discovering what it means to be human and who, in the process, will sometimes show you things about the world and about faith that you haven't seen before.
And in the church, remember the double honour: they're not just image bearers of God, they're brothers and sisters in Christ. Which means they have a claim on you, and you on them, that goes deeper than any generational gap.
The answer is not to water the gospel down until it stops being true, it’s to distil it. To find the essentials, remove the unnecessary, and present something concentrated and real and worth carrying for a lifetime.
Listen to the full conversation on the Shock Absorber podcast. For more on theology, strategy, and practice in ministry, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or email joel@shockabsorber.com.
Soul Revival Church is an Anglican church in the Sutherland Shire and Ryde.