Landmines have rendered vast areas of the world no-go areas. Sadly, it has mainly been civilians that have carried the brunt of casualties from landmines. As well as the horrific injuries and fatalities they have caused, many thousands more have been cut off from access to water, farmland, or communication routes. Thankfully there has been an international ban on the laying of minefields since 1999. But, it will still take many years to remove the ones that still exist and the fear people have of losing life or limb along certain routes.

The Bible's landmines

Thanks to a combination of militant atheism and general biblical illiteracy, for many Christians the Bible is a minefield for their faith. Out of fear, we are cut off from many of the resources that help us grow in our faith.

For some, the whole Bible is a no-go area because of what have been considered the toxic texts. For others, the Old Testament is off limits. We restrict our movements to the safe areas—the presentable texts that can, without risk, be tweeted, made into a refrigerator magnet, or sewn into a quilt. But the number of Bible texts that can be considered politically correct, sentimentally significant, and safe are being whittled down on a daily basis. How far should we go to avoid criticism blowing up in our faces?

The problem is that a biblically illiterate church is an ineffective church. Paul was clear in 2 Timothy that "All Scripture is God breathed and useful" and through it the servant of God can be "fully equipped for ever good work." So a church full of women and men who are robbed of the confidence to access the majority of Scripture is ill-equipped to rise to the challenges and opportunities that our culture provides for service to God. Sadly I have met many victims of this. When Greg went to study physics at Oxford University, he had what many would consider to be a good grounding in the essentials of the Christian faith. But the challenging combination of a new social context, questions raised about the credibility of Old Testament Bible stories, and the lack of friends and mentors equipped to help him respond, meant his faith did not last the first academic year.

Too often those of us called and charged to teach the Word of God remain comfortably situated in the parts of the Bible we feel most at ease to teach. We try short series in the Epistles, handle the easiest of Jesus' parables, and maybe dabble with a few Psalms. These passages will cause the least amount of angst and take the least amount of preparation. With the busyness of pastoral ministry, sermon preparation is so easily squeezed and so we stick to what we know.

But in this way we teach the wider church to stay stuck within their safe spaces in Scripture too. I want to encourage you to be brave and play the role of the minesweeper. Be willing to engage with the difficult parts so that you can unlock the power of the whole Bible for the people you serve. If we don't, our churches will gradually starve itself as God was very deliberate giving us the breadth and depth of all sixty-six books of the Bible. The difficult texts don't have to hem us in. Instead, if we can see the value of preaching the difficult parts of the Bible we can release the church to enjoy the whole Bible, serving the whole world with the whole gospel.

Let me suggest five ways that you can help your congregation by tackling the hard parts of the Bible.

1. Survey your church

Many people imagine there are thousands of difficult parts of the Bible. They have come to believe that most of the Bible is too toxic, confusing, or embarrassing to tackle. Before planning a teaching series in your church why not ask your congregation which Bible passages they find most challenging. You could try this live at church in an open discussion, online as a survey, or through home groups. I have tried this in a number of contexts, including as part of an outreach week on a university campus, and I have found it to be useful in a number of different ways.

First, people will realize there are only a handful of challenging passages that are inhibiting them from engaging with the Bible. Second, listening to your congregation models servanthood, humility, and pastoral concern. We preachers often have a great reputation for liking the sound of our own voices and not spending much time listening to others. Asking your congregation what they are wrestling with sets a helpful expectation that the congregation will be wrestling with Scripture, but also shows that you are keen to serve and help them. Third, encouraging people to share the survey with their friends and family may act as a helpful evangelistic bridge. Inviting lapsed Christians or unbelievers to give input into your church's teaching program models something helpful. So once you have gathered the results of the survey and collated it, use it as the basis for planning an upcoming teaching series.

2. Plan for tough teaching

I once heard of a puritan preacher who spent five years preaching through the book of Job. While I admire the preacher's courage and tenacity, I am not sure that spending years looking at the theologically suspect pontifications of Job's supposed comforters is going to be particularly helpful. I do believe, however, that we need to help people out of their scriptural comfort zones by planning teaching series that will challenge and inspire. A more palatable strategy might be to spend one or two weeks targeting each difficult book or passage within a term's program. Alternatively, you could plan a longer-term diet for your congregation where you target the books of the Bible that are barely touched by your usual preaching plans or by the devotional reading of your congregation. What about a mini-series in Leviticus? Or a short course on Joshua and Judges?

3. Invite Q & A sessions

Encourage the church to dig deeper into difficult passages by running a sermon series and deliberately building a question and answer session at the end of each sermon, or even at the beginning. I have found that congregations listen in a different way if they know there is a time for questions. And they will engage differently during that time too.

Some preachers are fearful of this approach. Some are worried of being caught out by a tough question, not knowing the answer or communicating it badly. But we often ask the members of our congregations to be open about their faith with their friends and family thus exposing themselves to questions. Thus, if we are not willing to do the same in front of our congregations some may rightly question our integrity. Positively, if we do open ourselves up for questions and we don't know an answer that itself can paradoxically add credibility to our preaching. If we are honest when we don't know something, people will trust us when we say we do know something.

Also, as a pastor if you don't know the answer to a question but go away and do some homework and come back with an answer the next week that models a degree of humility and servanthood. I had to do this a lot in my early ministry as a church leader as I did not have at my fingertips passages that would apply to someone asking if they could remarry, or whether new archaeological evidence disproved the timeline of the Bible. I remember once a friend asked their preacher a question about the historicity of the Gospel accounts and when the preacher returned the following week carrying the two volumes of Josh McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict, the size of the books alone seemed sufficient to suitably convince them.

Perhaps being open about your need to do some research to answer a question will encourage your church members to go and do some digging of their own. By sharing your own difficulties, you give people permission and confidence to have a go at wrestling with the Bible themselves. Not coming up with immediate answers can be a very healthy approach.

4. Paradoxology

I have run many church camps, weekends away and ongoing sermon series on my book Paradoxology. I wrote the book as a cathartic experience—trying to wrestle openly with some of my own struggles with Scripture. What encouraged me was the way that teenagers and young adults engaged with the honesty of the book, but also the way older Christians who had unresolved questions in their faith were given permission to explore them.

One of the problems I find when we try to deal with the difficult texts of the Bible is that we often try to explain them away. We're tempted to either minimize the amount of challenge they present or we reduce them to a nice and simple soundbite which sounds great in a sermon but doesn't actually hold water in the cold hard light of day. In Paradoxology I aim to make the best scholarship available in an accessible way. I don't promise to answer all the questions that people could ever have about the toxic texts; instead, I want to help people develop a mind-set that is able to handle the complexity of Scripture by asking better questions and allowing the narrative of the Bible to shape their thinking more than philosophical syllogisms. The book explores the paradoxes contained in some of the more difficult Old and New Testament narratives including texts that deal with child sacrifice, genocide, prostitution, the silence of God, and the God who uses an unclean heathen king to punish his own chosen people.

5. Tool up

I have been involved in university and college ministry for my entire adult life. More and more I feel like we are sending our young people off to college like lambs to the slaughter. They are ill-prepared for the challenges they face of trying to reconcile their faith to the studies they are undertaking or to the questioning they will receive from living in close proximity to people who don't share their faith. It is not just students that face this challenge—so many of our congregation are spending most of their waking hours with people who know little or nothing about the Christian faith.

One of the vital ways we can equip our congregations better is to help them face up to the internal challenges of understanding their faith. We must give people the tools to handle the tough parts of their faith because they will be asked about it. One way to do this on top of Sunday morning services is through house groups, youth groups, book groups, etc. It is here that church members can be encouraged to invest in their spiritual development through reading Christian literature that will stretch them. Meeting together to discuss what they have learned through the reading can help them learn skills of wrestling and mutual encouragement and take more responsibility for their own spiritual development. The group can also encourage those who have had tough questions fired at them during the week.

Editor's Note: If you are challenged by what you read in this article, be sure to check out Krish's new book Paradoxology: Why Christianity Was Never Meant to Be Simple (Inter Varsity Press USA, 2017). Also check out Krish's article on CT Pastors: Preaching Paradox and the Paradox of Preaching.

Dr. Krish Kandiah is a social entrepreneur who advises the UK government on child welfare reform and refugee resettlement. He is in demand as a speaker, writer, and theologian.