Living the Questions is a new small-group program designed for Christian invitation, initiation, and spiritual formation. The program provides fourteen lesson plans and a series of video clips to stimulate discussion. In reviewing the course for Christian Century (April 5), Debra Bendis and Jason Byassee seem to assume that people who sign up for such a discussion group have been living in a cultural and spiritual vacuum. They also appear to think that in a church-sponsored course of study conformity to a particular party line would be a sign of wisdom. Anyone who agrees with these two positions should obviously avoid getting involved with Living the Questions. Neither of these assumptions, however, check out with my experience of reality.
The reviewers find fault with LtQ for pitching the course to "an audience of people involved enough in church to have been wounded by its fundamentalist versions." I don’t know on what planet Bendis and Byasee have been living. In my forty years of parish ministry, most of the people who showed up were either refugees from conservative congregations, or they were tentative seekers who had been avoiding religion because of what they had thought was the Christian point of view. The latter come from the fastest growing religiously identifiable group in the country, now about nineteen percent. I have yet to meet one who hadn’t thought that all Christians believed that Jesus got up out of the tomb and that baptism washed away all sin. As a test, I quizzed an eleven-year-old boy on these subjects. He has never been to a church, except for weddings, but he knows all about these beliefs, and he holds them in contempt.
The reviewers also complain that the speakers who appear on the video clips are a "discordant mix of voices". From such teachers, "people who are investigating Christianity will have a hard time deriving . . . a coherent introduction to Christianity." To me, the wide variety of views presented by LtQ make the course inviting and energizing. This is one of the most brilliant aspects of the series. In telling the Christian story, the course replicates the Bible, which — as everyone who has ever tried to read it knows — is as incoherent a mix of voices as you can find between two covers. Without having to be told in so many words, those who participate in the course discover the power that emerges when people are living the questions rather than accepting agreed-upon answers.
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