I have not learned wisdom, nor have I knowledge of the Holy One. - Proverbs 30:3 (ESV)

When I was preaching through Proverbs, I remember the amount of sheer overwhelm of knowledge and wisdom I felt as I worked through the teen chapters. Those chapters are so full of pithy sayings that it felt a little disorienting to learn so much and feel like I couldn’t take it all in. It was like drinking from a firehose. By the time I got to the thirtieth chapter and began to study the passage in which we find the verse above, I resonated with Agur’s (the author) sentiment like never before. Despite having studied and preached the proverbs all the way through, I was aware of this nagging feeling that I am so far behind on wisdom, knowledge, and prudence, so far behind in applying what I had learned, that it made sense to read the words, “I have not learned wisdom, nor have I knowledge of the Holy One.” It didn’t feel like I was reading someone else’s words; it felt like I was reading my own personal confession.

On the Difference Between Discussing and Understanding

The above reflection on my own experience leads me to make an observation about leading students in small groups: students will not be ready to understand every issue they want to discuss. If it was true for me that going all the way through Proverbs left me with an impression of how unwise, un-insightful, and imprudent I am, should not the students be faring the same or worse? 

With a fair amount of frequency, conversations with students that I have led have ended, not with a sense of understanding, insight, and clarity, but of mystery and wonder. I don’t think this is a bad thing; I think it is a good thing.

Why is it that not arriving at clarity isn’t always best? For one, there is not a clear and satisfying answer to every question. Some questions are better asked to be wondered at than answered. There are lots of questions like this. 

There is another reason that arriving at clarity isn’t always best, and it is related to the first: oftentimes, students will ask questions that are worthwhile, but they lack the biblical knowledge and intellectual discipline to hold the different parts of the answer together. This often looks like a student asking a question that skips three or four questions which the student has never considered. Answering the final question in the sequence may answer the student’s initial query, but it will be disjointed, a random and isolated fact that lacks dynamic connection to the student’s intellectual apparatus. Instead of jumping to the answer to the question that the student originally asked, small group leaders often do better to prompt the students to ask the questions whose answers build back toward the original question. When leaders do this, students often come to the answer to the question they asked without needing the leader to answer it. In this way, the leader helped the student to practice clear thinking rather than functioning as someone to whom the student could outsource thinking. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of teaching the students how to think over teaching the students what to think. 

Promoting Exploration Instead of Providing Answers

So, how does this work in practice? It is simple. Whenever students ask me a question, my default is not to answer it right away. Instead, I consider what kind of information the student is asking me to provide. In general, I want to get as much juice out of a question as possible.

The main thing I want to do when a student asks a question is to use it as an opportunity to explore, and hopefully expand, their understanding. There are two questions in particular that I wonder to myself when a student asks a question.

The first question is, ¨What else don’t they know that’s connected to what they are asking?” I will give the most common example that has happened lately. It has been so frequent in the last couple months that some students have started to pick up on it and provide their own caveats to questions. The example is the distinction between God’s action in eternity and God’s action in space and time. I have received several questions recently related to God’s work in history, meaning space and time as we conceive it. There have been questions about God’s knowledge of the future, and His ordination of all things. What the students consistently have missed is our limited comprehension of God’s actions. They conflate time and space with eternity, and so find themselves hopelessly confused. By remembering that we cannot comprehend God’s eternal nature as unbound by time and space, we are helped not to treat eternity as just a really long time. So, instead of answering their questions directly, I have been challenging the underlying premises, and they have, I think, been helped by that. Some of them have learned to frame their questions in a different way. They have also been reminded of my own limits as a pastor. I do not know everything, and I don’t think that I pretend that I do, which I hope has the effect of bringing me down to their level in their minds and exalting God to a higher one.

In addition to asking what they don’t know, I also ask myself the following question: What might they have asked if they knew better? Not all questions are created equal. It is fairly common for a student to ask a question that has little potential for a fruitful discussion. It may not be because the question is bad or wrong; it may only be that the answer is relatively simple and uncontroversial, and therefore often uninteresting. But if I consider what they might have asked, I am led to think about different kinds of questions related to their question that I suspect the students themselves might find more helpful to discuss. It has been said many times in many different ways that questions are fundamental to learning. Where there is little curiosity, there can be little learning.

There is an important caveat to make here: I am not trying to avoid answering the question. Instead, I am seeking to answer the question the student asked along with several others that the student didn’t ask. I do not want to leave the student dissatisfied with my answer; I want the student not only to be satisfied but intrigued by additional thoughts and ideas that the student didn’t even realize was part of the original question. At times, I have seen leaders take students’ questions and treat them more as a personal challenge to be defended against than as a question to be answered.

Conclusion

Arriving at a conclusion but not necessarily resolution means that small group leaders can be ok leaving the students wondering at or puzzling over something. There does not always have to be a clean and clear answer to every question a student asks. In fact, it is often better for leaders to encourage further thinking and more discussion than to try to answer the question and move on. The exploration and discussion is a hugely important aspect of precisely what the students need to learn. This is why leaders can at times do better to provoke more questions than provide answers. The conversation must eventually conclude, but the students can be left to continue pondering what was discussed long afterward.