A man in our group came in unsettled. A homeless man on the street asked him for money, and he did not know what to do. He wanted an answer. Nobody in the room had one, but I told him I was glad he was troubled.
I have thought about that exchange for years because it taught me something about faith formation: Sometimes our job is not to resolve people’s questions but to create a place where they can ask them honestly.
For 12 years, I have led Faith in Real Life at Decatur Presbyterian Church, two small groups that meet once a week to discuss the lectionary text. Afterward, I write about our conversation and add my reflections in my “Faith in Real Life” blog, distributed to congregants and friends.
Sometimes our job is not to resolve people’s questions but to create a place where they can ask them honestly.
These groups do not require prior knowledge of Scripture; what matters more is an open mind and heart. And, perhaps most importantly, no questions are off-limits.
That last sentence is easy to print but hard to mean.
Permission to ask the real questions
I came to these groups with decades of academic and professional know-how. I expected to teach, but I have learned that my “not knowing” is every bit as valuable as my ability to cross-reference texts, exegete the original languages and pull from experience.
People often know what they are supposed to believe. That knowledge creates oughts and shoulds rather than discussion. They have heard for decades that God is love. What they have not had is a place to say they do not experience it or that a certain passage frightens them.
One participant put it this way: “Over the weeks there have been more questions than answers,” he wrote, “but the Socratic educational system does work. I am happy with the experience and have not yet considered an exit.”
Another came because he had struggled for a long time with his faith and stayed because the atmosphere let him ask uncomfortable questions.
Neither mentions learning anything. Both mention permission.
Permission to admit they don’t believe what they are supposed to believe. Permission to say a passage bores them, angers them or leaves them cold. Permission to say that the answer they were given as a child — about suffering, answered prayer or why God let something happen — stopped working around the time their mother died, and they have been faking their way through the creed ever since.
I once asked the group whether there was anything not acceptable to pray for. The first answer was revenge. The second was self-serving requests. Both, it turns out, are all over the Psalms. Nobody had ever told these people they belonged to a large cloud of witnesses who shared their predicaments.
Learning to lead without resolving
Leadership of these groups asks me to stop using what I know to end a conversation. It is harder than it sounds, because being the expert is the role everyone in the room wants to hand me.
I still bring what I know. Information is not the enemy. But the moment I use it to close a question rather than open one, the room goes polite, and politeness is often the end of transparency.
The moment I use it to close a question rather than open one, the room goes polite, and politeness is often the end of transparency.
It also asks me to let a conversation end unresolved. I like things to make sense. But summations can end inquiry, tying it off before anyone leaves. Most weeks, the honest ending is that we do not know, that several people hold incompatible views, and that we will try again next week.
Leadership also asks me to be implicated — to include myself in the conversation without making it about me.
I once told the group about a colleague I was having difficulty with, a man so sure he was right that there was no room for dialogue. I said that in the corporate world, we would give him a retirement party and watch the door hit him on the way out. A friend interrupted: “That’s what happens in the corporate world. How would a Christian handle it?”
I hate it when my faith gets in the way of my self-righteousness. I said that, too, because a leader who only tells stories where they come off well teaches the group that this is a place to protect egos.
My own faith did not start with an answer either. The summer before my last year of seminary, I did a chaplaincy internship in Kansas — the first time I was with people in crisis instead of talking about crisis in the abstract. That was also the summer my younger brother was diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him a few months later.
At his funeral, Scripture I did not understand, much less believe in, comforted me anyway. I did not walk away with a resolved theology. I walked away believing that love was the one thing worth spending a life on. Fifty years later, that is still closer to the foundation of my faith than anything I was taught to recite.
What grows when we don’t know together
For most of these 12 years, it has been hard to tell how people were engaging with what I wrote each week. I typically get two to four written responses from the 200 or so readers, and I told myself not to measure myself by the literary equivalent of likes. I still think that’s the right posture. But reading some of those past comments, I found a wider perspective on what happens in the groups. People quoted sentences of mine back to me that I did not remember saying.
One woman had kept a running list of things she remembered. Another told me she would go home and look up verses to refute me — but she kept coming. Another wrote that her mother’s death had pushed her into the group and that she still leaves most weeks with her thoughts swirling — hopeful that the confusion is a step toward understanding rather than a detour from it.
That is what a group produces when it has spent years being allowed not to know things together — space to be lost, fallible and accepted.
A relatively new member wrote: “I may not know much about your professional lives or the names of your kids, but I know quite a bit about your spiritual journey, and I trust you with mine.”
That is what a group produces when it has spent years being allowed not to know things together — space to be lost, fallible and accepted.
Twelve years in, the whole job is to make room — for a man to admit he did not know what to do about a stranger asking him for money, to hear that nobody else in the room knew either and, eventually, to find that this is not a failure of his faith but the beginning of it.
I was glad he was troubled. I still am.
