Jesus asked what people were saying about him before he asked what his friends believed. Start there too. When a young person says Jesus was a good teacher, they are telling you something true and something incomplete, and you cannot know which part matters to them until you ask.

The idea is common inside the church as well as outside it. Dr. Mikel Del Rosario, who teaches Bible and theology at Moody Bible Institute, tells of a woman who attended church regularly and wanted to know where the idea that Jesus is God even came from. He had his Bible out on the table. In his words, “And she takes my Bible and she says, according to this, Jesus never claimed to be God.” Del Rosario finds that many people in the church are reading skeptical scholarship or following new religious movements that deny Jesus is God. If a churchgoing adult can say what she said, a teenager can say it with more confidence and less church behind them.

The question also travels fast online. Lisa Fields has watched it happen: a popular rapper said on a well-known podcast that he did not understand the idea of Jesus being God, and clips of moments like that spread across social media within days. Your young person has probably seen some of them.