I first met Amber when she attended one of our ministry’s summer mission trips as a guest. Every night, when our mission team gathered to debrief, Amber rapidly would ask a series of questions. Wrestling with those questions throughout the week fueled tremendous spiritual growth in Amber.
Amber’s eagerness to question her faith during this trip made me wonder if this was a new phenomenon for her. Eventually, I learned that it was. In church, Amber was taught primarily through sermons designed to tell her what to believe and seldom given the opportunity to question anything she was told. Even on rare occasions when she had the chance to raise questions, Amber typically chose not to because she had been taught that questions were a sign of doubt, and doubt a sign of weakness. Rather than appear weak, Amber let her questions fester until eventually, her faith grew stagnant.
Telling or Asking?
Unfortunately, Amber’s story is not the only one. Today, many youth feel much more comfortable being told what to believe than being challenged to figure it out personally. Perhaps this is one reason, according to some denominations, an alarming 50 percent of graduates either fall away from their faith or their faith communities upon entering college.
In order to more effectively impact our students’ short- and long-term faith development, I believe youth workers need to start teaching in a new way. Rather than tell students what to think, we need to use questions to teach our students how to think critically about their faith, then give them a safe environment in which to ask questions. Rather than try to answer all these questions, we need to encourage our students who have unresolved questions to continue wrestling with their faith and take ownership of it—an introduction to apologetics.
Such a philosophy has been present in other cultures for centuries. The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates used a series of thought-provoking questions to challenge his students to examine the validity of their opinions and beliefs, something now referred to as the Socratic Method.
The Jewish culture also values questions and debate. One example of this is the Midrash. Author Judith M. Kunst explains in her book, The Burning Word, “Midrash reads the Hebrew Bible not for what is familiar but for what is unfamiliar, not for what’s clear, but for what’s unclear; then wrestles with the text, passionately, playfully and reverently. Midrash views the Bible as one side of a conversation, started by God, containing an implicit invitation, even a command, to keep the conversation going.”
Jesus Probed with Questions
It seems this Jewish value also influenced Jesus’ response to questions during His ministry.
As Brian McLaren says in his book Adventures in Missing the Point, “The questions the Bible raises in your mind may be more important than the answers you find in it. Ever notice, when Jesus was asked a question, how often He answered with another question?”
Besides answering questions with questions, Jesus also commonly responded to questions by telling stories.
In both cases, it seems Jesus created more questions than He answered—something He didn’t seem to fear as much as we do. Perhaps He understood unresolved questions can be a catalyst for spiritual growth.
Unresolved questions typically lead to additional questions that encourage students to participate in conversations they otherwise might not have had. They challenge students to go deeper and investigate Scripture for themselves rather than depend on someone else to do it for them. Unresolved questions also emphasize the learning process rather than shortchange it, something that happens far too often when we instead focus on answering questions.
What’s more, embracing unresolved questions also frees leaders to admit when questions stump them and to respond to them simply by saying, “I don’t know, but let’s talk about it and try to figure it out together.”
A Question-Based Approach to Youth Ministry
Given the great impact question-based teaching can have on students, how can we as youth workers, utilize this teaching philosophy in our ministries?
First, recognize that it’s possible to teach using questions and that doing so actually may increase the impact you have on your students’ faith. By asking a series of thought-provoking questions, you can incrementally and logically guide students to a desired conclusion. This allows students to be actively involved in the learning process, which will excite their curiosity, arouse their thinking and allow them to experience the joy and excitement of discovery.
Next, reexamine your approach to Scripture. Rather than try to explain away difficult passages or reduce stories to formulas and life lessons, make it your job to raise questions about Scripture. Point out the inherent mystery found in Scripture, the unknowns in stories and the seemingly contradictory things found throughout the Bible.
To do this, read a passage in search of questions: What’s bizarre or mysterious about it? What information do you lack about the story’s characters? Why might that information be missing? What questions does the text raise about God’s character, the person of Christ or Christianity?
Raise these questions as you teach and allow students to wrestle with some of them. Encourage youth to “fill in the blanks” regarding characters in the story that you don’t know much about. Doing so will make those characters come alive to your youth and help them better relate to them.
Encourage students to pose additional questions about the passage. Answer some of them by following Jesus’ example and responding to questions with more questions. Turn a student’s question around by asking, “What do you think about that?” Raise even more questions by playing Devil’s Advocate, deliberately challenging students’ beliefs and help them think outside the box.
Teach with your end goal in mind and continually ask yourself, “What question(s) do I want my students to leave wrestling with?” Measure your success by the questions your teaching raises in your students.
Recently, I used this approach to explore “The Problem of Pain” with my students. One goal in this discussion was to leave students wrestling with the question, “Where does evil come from?” Twenty-four hours after our discussion ended, one of my normally apathetic students, Jeff, texted me: “If God doesn’t create natural disasters or evil, then how come the end-time prophesies involve earthquakes? Doesn’t that show that God really does create evil?”
My response to this very difficult question was simply, “I don’t know, but let’s talk more about this.”
In subsequent conversations, I’ve been amazed by the quality of Jeff’s questions, his determination to continue wrestling with this complex issue and the spiritual growth that it has sparked in him. Though Jeff may never find satisfactory answers to his questions, wrestling with them, as question-based teaching has taught him to do, will have a lasting impact on his faith as he continues to draw closer to a God who’s unafraid of even his hardest questions.
