Marc's Minute #6
The bi-weekly quick "K.I.T." equipping you with Knowledge for your Head, Inspiration for your Heart, and Tools for your Hands {10/1/23}
Feature Focus
Unquestioned answers are often more dangerous than unanswered questions. This is something I truly believe, especially when it comes to faith and religion.
The key to great learning and spiritual development can be found in our questions. Check out part one of this article I wrote on the power of questions. I hope you find something practical that you can use in your life.
Let me know what you think of “It Is Good To Question” (part 1). Here is an excerpt to get you started:
Few things in the Bible paint so clear a picture of our condition as the questions we ask. In encounters with Jesus, people asked questions that revealed their religious tendencies, meaning their inclination to judge, impose upon others, label, categorize, and be superficial. Examples of questions that are asked with impure motives, absent of genuine curiosity, include:
Why does he (Jesus) eat with tax collectors and sinners?
Why do your disciples break the law on the Sabbath?
Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating food with unclean hands?
Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?
Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?
We find a pattern of religion in these kinds of questions. They are posed with the intent to change the other, not oneself. They deal with who is in or out, labeling people as superior or inferior based on what they do. The above inquiries seek black-and-white answers that maintain a hierarchy. Their intention is to establish rules for how the “in crowd” lives while making everyone else subordinate. There may be something valuable in some of these questions, but true enlightenment is not the impetus for asking questions in this manner.
Find a better and more useful way of asking questions in the rest of the article here.
Keep It Simple Strategy
If you are meeting with friends, in small groups, or just working on your own faith journey, then check out this week’s simple and reproducible practice tip that you can try anytime. Remember, you can always find many more FREE materials at Grace In Motion.
POTLUCKS
This one is a quick and easy suggestion for any small group or simple church or house church gathering. It is always great to have food when you can. The best fellowship and bonding and learning often happen around a table while sharing a meal.
The key to keeping it simple and easily reproducible is to share the responsibility for meal prep. Avoid making it one person’s job to prepare a full meal and avoid the habit of having the host do all the work. Each person brings a small dish or a snack.
This way individuals can choose what to bring and account for their own food allergies and preferences. In the groups and church meetings I have been a part of since leaving the institutional church, we have never required anyone to bring anything. This is an important component, as well. As much as possible, you want to make everything optional and always allow people to participate at their comfort level.
Good food. Good meat. Good God. Let’s eat. Potlucks!
Recommended Resource
For this issue, I am actually recommending a resource that my very own simple church group is reviewing together in the coming weeks. It is a podcast series from Tim Mackie, one of the founders of The Bible Project, called Exploring My Strange Bible.
For so many of us, the Old Testament is a confusing piece of ancient writing. Without some basic understanding of context and writing styles of the original authors, we don’t see any relevance to the teachings of Jesus or to our own lives today.
Tim Mackie is one of the best at opening up Scripture so that it becomes easier to understand while still maintaining its complexity and literary genius. This particular recommended resource is a free podcast (3-part series), which offers a crash course on the Torah. You will learn what Jesus and the apostles thought of this section of the Hebrew Bible and how they used it to present the good news about what God is really like.
If you are a Christian wanting to deepen your appreciation of the story of the Bible or if you are a skeptic who is tired of hearing some Christians quote Scriptures and turn them into cliches and platitudes, then I think you will enjoy, and benefit from, Mackie’s series.
What’s Up?
I’m turning the tables this time. Instead of saying what’s up with me and Closer Than You Think, I would like to hear what’s up with you.
What is a question you have about faith, God, Christianity, etc. that has always bugged you?
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