Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” - John 3:3-4 (ESV) 

This turn in conversation is one instance of many in the Gospels. Here, Jesus makes an unexpected turn in conversation that provokes a confused question from Nicodemus. This is because Jesus said something that he did not understand. Nicodemus rightly focuses on the idea of being born again. What does Jesus mean by that? How can it make sense? Whatever Nicodemus had come expecting from Jesus, it was not this. Jesus said something that Nicodemus could not quite understand, and it prompted him to ask Jesus to help him understand. Small group leaders can do a similar thing. 

This article is intended to help small group leaders leverage confusion and cognitive dissonance to take what could be seen as a setback in conversation and make it a way to advance instead. It is often the case that leaders are bothered by the fact that students do not understand something. But this should not be a problem for leaders. It should rather be interpreted as a bad sign when students act or talk as though they do understand. The default is for students not to understand. That is why their cognitive dissonance is a good sign rather than a bad one. They have enough presence of mind, enough understanding, to know that they do not understand, that they are not putting things together properly. It is a worse sign when they do not understand and yet do not perceive their lack of understanding.  

Dismantling False Certainty 

Notice that Jesus does not start the conversation by telling Nicodemus that he needs to understand something. Nicodemus had already started by saying that they knew something, that Jesus was a teacher from God (John 3:2). Nicodemus did not start out with doubts, but with certainty. In reply, Jesus cast Nicodemus from certainty into doubt, not necessarily about whether Jesus is a teacher from God, but what Nicodemus understood Jesus to be teaching.  

People do not like being confused. Small group leaders do well to encourage students not to settle for poor thinking to avoid the discomfort of confusion. I put confusion and cognitive dissonance together, not because they are exactly the same, but because they are close enough to be easily mistaken for one another. We may define cognitive dissonance the sensation of the parts not properly adding up to the whole. Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable perception of a discrepancy between two or more ideas. Something does not fit. As a result, our minds are left unsettled.  

We may refer to the effect of this cognitive dissonance as confusion. In confusion, like cognitive dissonance, things do not fit together properly in our minds. But confusion is a broader term than cognitive dissonance. Whereas cognitive dissonance requires at least one idea not to seem to fit well with others, confusion may be a more generalized experience. In confusion, there may be too many ideas at play even to try to sort them out, or there may be a near-total lack of comprehension of the ideas in discussion, or there may be an uncertainty regarding the goal of the conversation. Confusion is also, interestingly, something of which people are not always aware in themselves. A student may be confused and not even realize it. In these cases, there should be cognitive dissonance, but there is not. Small group leaders, being aware of these things, can leverage these concepts as tools to help the students with their thinking as they participate in discussion.  

When Jesus spoke with Nicodemus, He moved him in the conversation from a place of thinking that he understood, and perhaps even from a place in which he believed himself intellectually superior to Jesus, to a place of consternation. Nicodemus began the conversation with a remark that looks deferential on the one hand but condescending on the other. He conceded that Jesus must be a teacher from God because of the kinds of things that they have seen Him do and heard him say. But he also came to Him as one of the club members who knew who Jesus was. As a member of the elite religious group, the Pharisees, there is a sense that they accepted Jesus as part of the club of which they were the leaders. Jesus responded by utterly confounding him. He proceeded to chide Nicodemus for being a teacher of Israel and yet not understanding the things that he was talking about. No doubt, Nicodemus was listening well. Had Jesus responded differently, perhaps by being polite and dropping into the conventional manner in which Nicodemus was speaking, how much harder would it have been to move Nicodemus to the place that he needed to be?  

For Nicodemus to learn, Jesus needed to convince him that he did not understand as well as he thought he did. And so He said something that began their conversation with a point of confusion. Jesus provoked cognitive dissonance. He did not avoid it. Small group leaders can do the same. Jesus did not do it with every person in every circumstance, and neither should small group leaders. Leading students in small group discussion is an art and a science. It requires knowledge of the truth and love for the students, but it also requires the eye of an artist, looking at the group as a canvas, with each member representing specific issues that need to be taken into consideration. Cognitive dissonance does a delightful job of helping to bring places of misunderstanding, wrong assumptions, misapprehensions, and confusion to the surface.  

Dissonance as an Opportunity 

Oftentimes, a small group leader might be surprised and even dismayed by what students fail to understand. They believe it is a setback. That is not true. It is not a setback but an opportunity to engage students in an area of doctrine that they otherwise would not have known was lacking or deficient. 

How do leaders do this? It is simple: ask the students what bothers them. Let them take their time. They often find it difficult to express what it is that bothers them, and oftentimes their answers are more like guesses than real insights into their own minds. Leaders do not have to have the exact right answer or solution to the problem. As often as not, the root of the problem is not in what the student is thinking so much as how the student is thinking. If a leader solves the particular problem that is bothering the student, they may have done the equivalent of giving a man a fish. What leaders should always be looking to do is, so to speak, to teach the man how to fish. In this case, that means small group leaders should be seeking to understand the students’ minds as they reveal them, and not only the doctrine abstracted from them.  

Here is an example. Take a student who is bothered by a sermon or text that says that obedience to God is required for Christians. “But wait,” they say, “I thought that we were saved by grace and not by works? If we are saved by grace, why does what we do matter? And if what we do matters, then are we saved by grace or are we saved by grace plus works?”  

The correct doctrinal answer is to tell the student that the Christian’s obedience to Christ is not the ground of salvation, but evidence for it. Obedience is not the source of salvation, but is evidence of it (Cf. Romans 6; Matthew 7; Ephesians 2). However, it is good for the leaders to ask themselves, “What is it like inside the mind of a person who conceives of no need to obey Christ? Is that where these students are? Do they experience guilt or shame at their sin? Are their consciences sensitive, or are they seared? What is their conception of God?” Internal questions like these in the leader’s mind will prompt the leader to ask more questions of the student rather than correcting the doctrine. The correct doctrinal stance should be arrived at eventually, but it is not as urgent as the state of the students’ hearts before God. The doctrine must be applied to where they are, or the correct answer will remain no more than that: an intellectual curiosity. Leaders should not settle for satisfying the intellectual curiosity of students. Leaders should go for the heart by applying the doctrine to the students’ conceptions of themselves in the world and before God.  

Conclusion 

Cognitive dissonance is not a problem for small group leaders. It is rather an opportunity. Every instance of cognitive dissonance is a potential opportunity to get at the students’ hearts to apply the Word of God to the deep places of their souls, the places where they have their innermost thoughts, their heart that is the wellspring of life (Proverbs 4:23). This is what Jesus generally did, and small group leaders can learn from His example.