My friend, Ferdi, is a Philippino of Chinese descent. He was recently called to work as the youth leader in a Korean church in the Philippines. In an e-mail, I asked him how the work was going. “Well,” he said, “but I have to make sure I say everything in the simplest words I can so that they can be translated for the students who only speak Korean.” That got me thinking. Do the youth we work with understand what we teach them, or are they as lost as Koreans trying to understand a Philippine language?

Some youth ministry leaders think those of us working with teenagers are engaged in a cross-cultural enterprise. They say that the adolescent culture in the United States is so far removed from the culture we live in as adults that, to reach young people, we have to reach into a different culture, translating the Gospel into something they can understand as we teach them. Certainly, teenager share much of the American culture of adults, but I suspect there is an element of truth to this claim. Teenagers today are more multi-cultural, more technologically savvy, and have access to more information than my generation ever did. Most of your younger youth view the 9/11 attacks in a way that is similar to how my generation viewed Pearl Harbor. It was a tragic event of the past, but it was long ago.

So, how does this affect the way we approach teaching them. Many youth leaders believe the best approach is for us to learn as much as we can about the world of teenagers. They say we need to study their trends, watch the movies and TV shows they watch, play their video games, and walk the halls of their schools. This has a lot of merit. You will have a better sense of how to teach your teenagers when you understand what it is like to walk in their shoes. You will have a better sense of how to address the lies they are being fed . . . about sex, God, and their own value. Study of their culture will also help you to anticipate things that just don’t connect with them. If they are constantly taught that humans are amoral, born without a good or bad nature, then they are not likely to understand when you talk about our sin nature. You may need to explain it a bit further.

However, I think my Philippino friend had it right. Mostly, we need to present the truths of the Bible as simply as we can. We need to translate every truth of Scripture so that teenagers can understand. I don’t mean that we need to make the Bible simplistic. The Bible is anything but that. But, in teaching complicated and profound truth, we need to slow down and make it clear to them.

Want to know if they got it? Ask them to explain it back to you . . . preferably a week later.