The God Squad
After much talking it, my [awesome] friend Meredith finally gave me the required kick in the rear to make the religious discussion group a reality. After some collaboration on what we wanted it to be, we kicked off a couple of weeks ago w/ a small group meeting at my house. Yay!
I think we expected a more diverse sampling of people and we were going to discuss big topics like "Is there a really a God?" and "Is Jesus really the Son of God?". After the first couple of meetings, it seems that we have people w/ a protestant evangelical background and who, for the most part, would call themselves Christians, but who are also unsatisfied w/ the current state of Christianity in this country, the world, and perhaps in our individual lives. I think people are still interested in asking the hard questions, but it's hard to know where to start. So I'm blogging about it. Maybe we can figure it out here.
After a decent amount of thought on the topic, I definitely think we need _some_ structure for this to be successfull. I also think it's OK to take some time to figure out what that needs to be, so hopefully you all will bear with us as we collectively do that. Last week, we started w/ some pretty big basic question: What is the ultimate spiritual authority? Is it the protestant Bible? Is it the Church? Is it the Pope? We got sidelined into a [great!] philisophical discussion about if we can know the truth or not. (I still contend that truth is out there and we should at least search for it!) The problem with this is that it had no practical bearing on our current spirituality and, therefore, our lives. Plus, many people were left out of the discussion.
So I think next week we should take a different approach. Given our collective similarities, let's assume we accept all the tennets of Christianity and let's begin by talking about the little things that bug us or that we question... perhaps little things we no longer live out or accept in our lives. It can be a gripe session about church, people, christians; it can be a vision of where the church should be going or what you think a christian "looks like"... It can be theological differences. From these discussions, I think we'll be forced into talking about the bigger things, but it will come from a more practical side.
What do you guys think?
posted by chewie at 10:16 PM
5 Comments:
I'm cool with starting with some issue and trying to figure out the different points of few and why they exist. That way I might be able to confidently hold to my point of view in the future. However, I'm don't like the idea of a gripe session. I question that it will get us anywhere and I find that it's not that enjoyable. We could begin with a few topic suggestions based on gripes, but that's about as far as it should go..in my opinion.
10:49 PM
i agree with natalie...i don't really want this to become a gripe session. i am definitely guilty of doing such things, but i don't really find them productive or encouraging in the end. so, i really do think beginning with 'is the bible the ultimate authority?' is a good question. it sounds almost blasphemous to say it, but i think it's key--especially as we begin to grapple with other, and perhaps, more controversial topics. is our reference point always the bible? should it be?
11:33 AM
i agree with natalie...i don't really want this to become a gripe session. i am definitely guilty of doing such things, but i don't really find them productive or encouraging in the end. so, i really do think beginning with 'is the bible the ultimate authority?' is a good question. it sounds almost blasphemous to say it, but i think it's key--especially as we begin to grapple with other, and perhaps, more controversial topics. is our reference point always the bible? should it be?
11:33 AM
that's fine... I was just exaggerating a bit. I want to get to the meat of things, but sometimes it helps to start talking about the more practical matters. Mer, like you said, we can start w/ any current hot-topic issue. We'll find soon that we need to look beyond the sunday school answer of "because the bible says so" to get to real answers. And it's that grappling that will then bring out things like the wesleyan quadrangle (which includes experience, etc.) and other thoughts and approaches.
3:13 PM
This makes me wish I still lived in the 'burg!
12:54 PM
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