Growing up in a black church I was used to getting preached at. The loud cries and shouts from the front of the church encouraged propositions and declarations. It wasn’t until I was a young adult considering ministry that I discovered sometimes the answer is in the question.
I don’t remember what I said or what particular youth night or revival service it was but Elder Dwayne Loughridge (He wasn’t quite “eld” but in COGIC when you pass the exam you get to be called an elder) stumped me with a question. I was getting so used to religious cliches and slogans being thrown around I started saying them too. Dwayne helped me to critique these cliches and some of the faulty theology behind them with questions.
And then my world opened. I stopped reading the Bible and spitting out an unexamined theology. The questions gave me a sense of pause and thrust me into a lifelong pursuit of learning. In other words, questions showed me I haven’t and never will arrive.
Throughout the gospels, Jesus serves up questions. Sometimes he poses questions as answers to other people’s questions. There are questions about fasting and praying and inclusion/exclusion and there are even questions regarding his identity.
Jesus brings questions and therefore Jesus brings tension. This is the total opposite of the Jesus presented in the modern-day Western church. For the common churchgoer, Jesus is seen as the one who eases the tension and brings comfort to the tension of life. Jesus does ease tension and bring comfort but the truth is in order to do that he brings more tension and makes things more uncomfortable.
Most people go to Sunday morning service or a small group Bible study to get answers and not necessarily questions. If they do get questions it’s regarding things they already know. Nothing challenging or uncomfortable. Most times questions are open-ended or rhetorical. They don’t move us to search our hearts and lives for contradictions. They don’t call us to look in the mirror and face the tension in our hearts and in our lives.
Those aren’t Jesus’ questions. Jesus wasn’t about giving easy answers. And that’s what the typical church usually gives. Easy answers. No wonder our young people are bored and unmotivated regarding church attendance and participation. The world isn’t that easy. The world doesn’t let us off the hook when it comes to the discomfort life brings. So why does the church avoid wrestling with questions?
Part of the reason is that we think we are God. We want to declare and decree. We want to be the authoritative voice. This kind of thinking and mindset makes life easier. If we want to know what to do or how to think, just turn to the voice of authority in our lives. Just like children. But God doesn’t want us to remain children. He wants us to be adults. He wants us to grow up. And growing up requires wrestling with questions.
In Communication theory for Christian Witness, Chuck Kraft talks about the ways different types of communication land on us. Some things are just not designed to transform us. One of the things not designed to transform us is…drumroll please…the traditional church sermon.
Yes, it’s a shocker but the traditional sermon does not necessarily transform us. It only serves to rally us around things we already agree on. It’s the verbal glue that holds a church together socially. That’s why when you rock the boat and tackle a tough topic you get so much pushback. That’s not what your average church parishioner came to service for. They came to hear something they already agreed with. In other words, they came for socializing entertainment.
It uncannily resembles the words about Israel spoken by the prophet Ezekiel about how they come to him like they are there to hear a beautiful concert but not obey the word (Ezekiel 33:30-33). It’s also similar to Paul’s warning to Timothy of people with itching ears gathering teachers who will tell them whatever they want to hear (2 Timothy 4:3-4).
Kraft compares several other communication methods with the sermon. Media communication actually comes in dead last in terms of affecting change in the receptors. Preaching is next in terms of creating change of behavior.
The two methods that align with the goals of transformation the most are small groups and life on life interaction. Both of these methods imply questions. It’s not just the lone teacher providing students with answers. It’s a person encountering questions in a group. It’s a person learning through the questions emerging from the intimate contact with another person’s life.
In other words, expecting behavioral change solely through the Sunday morning sermon is misguided. This kind of mindset is based on the model of banking education. Paulo Freire describes this aptly in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In this model the teacher deposits information in the “banks” of the students for future withdrawal. This is not transformative at all. It’s just a way to socialize and bring the student to an agreement with the information being presented.
This is the way we were “educated” in school. The teacher presented the information and we absorbed it enough to spit it out during the test. The result: a nation of people with degrees who know nothing. If I surveyed the American public and asked them to solve a trigonometry problem or the role Venice played during the early Renaissance they would come up short. Why? Because they didn’t truly learn these things. They were just bits of information they hung on to just long enough to pass an exam.
Which begs the question: What does it mean to be educated? There are tons of people with degrees who are considered by the standards of this world educated. Many of them follow conspiracy theories. Many of them could not tell you how our government works or what constitutes thorough scientific or historical research.
They are victims of the banking system of education. GIGO=Garbage In Garbage Out. WYSIWYG=What You See Is What You Get. In other words, the garbage went in and the garbage went out. Now what you see is what you get and all that is are a bunch of hollow shells that crammed for the test.
This is the total opposite of asking questions and participating in a dialogue. This banking system of education is the opposite of transformative learning. Transformative learning as pioneered by Jack Mezirow says people don’t learn unless they are questioning and critiquing their assumptions. In other words, you can’t truly learn and be transformed unless you’re asking questions.
So what really can get people to change behavior? Change of behavior usually comes from experiencing difficulty. Facing things that jar us out of our familiar routine puts us in a position to question what we already know or think we already know. Those questions are the seeds of change.
This has huge implications for discipleship. Discipleship is about more than just facts and figures. Most discipleship programs espoused by churches advocate for going through a discipleship curriculum. These curriculums are designed to take you through the doctrines of the faith and the essential practices.
You don’t actually do these practices during the curriculum. You only are required to talk about them. You don’t actually attempt to implement them in your life. No. It’s enough to study them and agree that they are good to do.
This is far from the usual way people learn for behavior change. Behavior change is accomplished through one thing: Disorienting dilemmas. Disorienting dilemmas shake us out of our comfort zone. We are presented with an overwhelming or puzzling situation and we are left to make sense of it.
How do we make sense of situations like this? Through questions. These questions are either presented to us by a teacher or a friend or they emerge from our own hearts. Questions help us to look at the situation from an entirely different perspective.
These are the kinds of situations Jesus presented to his disciples. In fact, you could say their whole three years with Jesus was one disorienting dilemma after another. The cross and the resurrection would be the ultimate disorienting dilemma for the twelve.
You can track many of these in the gospels. The calming of the storm was a disorienting dilemma (Mark 5:45-52). The feeding of the five thousand was a disorienting dilemma (Mark 5:30-43). The feeding of the four thousand was a disorienting dilemma Mark 8:1-10, 14-21). The healing of the boy with the unclean spirit was a disorienting dilemma (Mark 9:14-29).
The conversion of Saul in Acts 9 also contains a disorienting dilemma. Here Saul is going off to persecute Christians and believes he is right in doing so. Then he gets knocked off his horse and is surrounded by light and hears a voice. The voice doesn’t present him with a declaration at first but with a question. “Saul, Saul, Why are you persecuting me?”
This question upends everything Saul knew about God and about being a Jew and about these Christian he is going after. His perspective would be different for the rest of his life. We wouldn’t have the passion, fervor, and impact Paul had on the world without this disorienting dilemma.
Jesus also presents us with disorienting dilemmas and it’s up to us to listen for the questions. Many times we are faced with circumstances that are out of our control or go against what we have always thought to be true. In these moments we have a choice. Will we keep going along stubbornly with what we’ve already believed or will we ask questions of our experience and seek a different perspective?
This is all for our growth and true growth doesn’t happen in a classroom sucking up facts. It happens in the mess and the mayhem of life. As we encounter situations and have to bring our whole selves to them we will ultimately come to questions that require more than easy answers.
These questions are what truly matters when it comes to growth and learning. Jesus could have sat the disciples down and spoon-fed them how he was the Son of God but he didn’t. He gave it to them little by little in the form of disorienting dilemmas and insightful questions. Jesus helps us grow in the same way and I’m guessing he probably wants us to help others grow in that way too.