I’ve had versions of the same conversation in country after country across Europe.

A youth leader sits across from me – sincere, committed, clearly loving the young people they serve – and says: “I really want to help them study the Bible properly. I do. I’m just scared. What if they get bored? What if we lose them?”

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And honestly, I get it, but at some point I started wondering whether that is even the right question.

Broken world

Josiah did not choose the world he was born into. He inherited it, eight years old, stepping into the wreckage of decades of spiritual compromise.

The temple was still standing. The rituals had not disappeared. From the outside, everything probably still looked religious enough. But the scroll, the actual Word of God, was gone.

That detail gets me every time.

It was not taken by an enemy army. It was not destroyed in a dramatic act of persecution. It was simply lost somewhere inside the house of God, buried under routine, neglect, and religious activity.

[photo_footer]Bible study with teenagers.[/photo_footer] 

And that feels painfully familiar.

When I look at Europe, I see a place where the Bible is often still respected from a distance, even loved in theory, and yet kept at arm’s length in practice.

The Patmos World Bible Attitudes Survey,  a 2025 global study covering 85 countries, found that in Southern and Eastern Europe, 57% of people are interested in learning more about the Bible, and 68% believe it is good for children to know its stories.

The hunger is there. But real engagement remains thin. So the scroll is not gone. It may just be buried. Under programmes. Under ministry schedules. Under our quiet fear that this generation has no appetite for depth.

But here is what I keep coming back to: Josiah began seeking God before the scroll was found. Before reform came. Before anyone showed him how. The hunger came first. God awakens hunger before leaders feel ready to respond to it.

Broken heart

Then the scroll was found. It was read aloud. And Josiah tore his robes.

That was not: “Interesting, thank you.” The Word hit him.

Hebrews 4:12 says the Word is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword. Psalm 51 tells us what God does with a broken and contrite heart, He does not despise it but he works with it.

Real renewal rarely begins with people becoming more efficient. It begins with people becoming more honest before God.

[photo_footer]Youth event.[/photo_footer] 

So here is the question I cannot stop asking, of myself, and of the leaders I train: when did the Word last not just inspire you, but actually break you?

I have led young people through many different kinds of Bible engagement over the years.But one experience has stayed with me more than the rest.

A Bible retreat, several days fully immersed in Scripture through personal study, shared discovery, creative response, music, art, honest reflection. No carefully packaged theme. No topic series. Just the Bible at the centre.

What happened in those days was hard to fake. People were not collecting information. They were encountering God.

A well-designed session can hold attention. A polished talk can impress people. But neither is the same as watching someone come alive inside the text itself.

Reform of the broken

After Josiah tore his robes, he did not stop there.He stood by the pillar. Made covenant before the Lord. Went first. And then the nation followed.

The Passover was restored after four hundred years. The covenant was renewed. But all of that came after something more personal and more costly: a leader was pierced by the Word and could no longer pretend that business as usual was acceptable.

I think that is still how real reform works.It starts when someone in the room is no longer willing to leave the Bible closed.

And young people are far more ready for this than we assume. We talk about teenagers as if they can only handle shallow things, as if depth automatically drives them away. I simply do not believe that anymore.

One story still makes me smile. A thirteen-year-old girl in one of my Bible studies, from a broken, non-Christian home, only a couple of years around church, went to Bible camp and came back burning.

Nobody told her to launch anything. She simply gathered friends from her neighbourhood and started reading the Bible with them.

A few weeks later, her pastor called me to complain. I received that complaint with considerable joy.

[photo_footer]This is her Bible[/photo_footer] 

Research from Barna’s Open Generation study found that teenagers who engage regularly with Scripture have had, on average, four adults in their lives who taught them how to study it. Not four programmes. Four people. People who opened the scroll and sat beside them in the text.

That is our role. Not to perform expertise. Not to be the most impressive person in the room. To help open the scroll, and sit beside young people long enough for them to meet God there.

That means leading from hunger, not image. It means using creativity – colour, drama,art, questions, silence,repeated reading – not as entertainment, but as doorways into encounter.

It means the Bible is no longer one segment of the gathering. It becomes the reason we gathered at all.

God’s heart has always been broken for this broken world. He has never stopped weeping over Europe’s lost generation. And He has never stopped looking for leaders who will let that break them too.

The scroll is right there, inside the temple, under the dust of our hesitation.

The only question is who in the room is going to pick it up first.

Ester Herasimovich is Youth coordinator for Community Bible Study Europe.

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