Psalm 25:4 - Make me to know your ways, O LORD; teach me your paths.
Many small group leaders are tempted to view students’ general ignorance as a significant hurdle to profitable conversation. While it is true that the less a student knows, the less they are able to connect the sermon or topic of conversation to what they already know, it is also true that their ignorance presents an opportunity for the leader. The leader can leverage the ignorance in the conversation by seeing it as an opportunity to teach one or two basic, foundational, core principles that are essential for the student to understand. A student’s ignorance presents an opportunity for quick growth. The difficulty for the small group leader need not be so much in the student’s ignorance but in the choice of what to attempt to teach in the moment. However, a small group leader generally is wise to choose a principle or idea that is easily grasped by the student, or at least easy enough for the student to connect to something already known.
Starting Where They Are
The difficulty in dealing with students’ ignorance is that it is difficult to know where to start. For leaders, it is challenging to put themselves in the minds of the students and understand what they do not know. Leaders may fail to establish a point of connection. When students do not understand a leader’s initial attempt at making the connection, the student may simply be left behind.
We may take the metaphor in the verse above as a starting point. Scripture uses walking as a metaphor for how we live all over Scripture. It is extraordinarily useful for the many analogies that can be drawn between the different aspect of walking to a place and the manner in which we live. It is also useful for thinking about ignorance. We can compare being ignorant to being off the path that we should be on. When students are ignorant of something that Scripture says is important, then we can conclude that there is some aspect of their lives that is either off the path Scripture would have them on or that they are in danger of veering off later.
How do leaders get students onto the path that Scripture says they need to be on? On the one hand, it requires that the Lord work in them. Apart from the Spirit gifting them faith to believe and illumination to understand, they will never walk in the path that Scripture demands. Leaders cannot be expected to produce changes in students that only God can produce. Leaders can, however, teach and lead students in dependence on the Holy Spirit to make it effective.
As leaders consider how to move students from where they are (a place of ignorance) to where they need to be, they need to know not only what Scripture says but also what students think. They need to know not only the specific piece of ignorance that surfaces in conversation, but also the broader context to gain perspective and to see how far off the path the students are in their understanding.
Following the Thread
How is it that leaders can leverage ignorance? It is because of what was just described in the paragraph above. When leaders discover an area or question about which the students are ignorant, it works like a thread the leader can follow until they find something the students understand. Sometimes, a student will have a clear understanding of some basic truths. Leaders can discover this by asking something like, “If you have trouble understanding this, then what about X?” (where “X” refers to some related idea, or something even more fundamental). Other times, students will find themselves expressing near total ignorance altogether. They come to find that they are not sure that they know anything at all!
How is it that students coming to believe they know nothing or nearly nothing a good thing? It is because then leaders can begin to build what they thought they knew on a foundation that they actually can know. Students often base their ideas on personal perception, commonly held ideas, or personal reasoning. But the Scriptures need to be the foundation of their knowledge, not themselves or others. It is a humbling experience.
The main thing leaders should focus on doing when they discover ignorance is ask questions. It is not helpful to begin to explain to students what they do not know because they are typically not ready to receive it. Sometimes, they are simply not interested, which may be for any number of reasons, but that is not typical. Typically, students are at least intrigued or mildly curious at the discovery of their own ignorance and are interested to know what it implies for them. By asking questions, leaders leverage the moment to ground the students more firmly in Scripture.
Sometimes, students will ask their own questions. When they do that, leaders need to be careful. If a leader begins a long speech, the student will quickly lose interest. It is typically better to give a brief answer at most before turning it back to the student and asking another question. This has the effect of communicating to the student that you are focused on them, not on yourself, that you are interested in their understanding more than in sharing your own, and that you are more interested in listening to them talk than in listening to yourself. In other words, it communicated trustworthiness.
Conclusion
In summary, discovering ignorance in students is not a bad thing but a good thing. Leaders can take the opportunity presented by the students to discover what students think they know versus what they really know. Leaders can ask questions to probe further and discover much more than if they simply spoke. And this last point is perhaps the key to the whole point about ignorance. Leaders may take learning students’ ignorance as a sign that the leaders need to set about explaining something, but this is the opposite of what normally is best. Leaders should instead answer the students’ ignorance by asking more questions and probing until they find something solid. It may be that the students reveal that they do not kno the LORD’s paths at all, and that they have been living in near total ignorance of anything that is truly true. Leaders cannot “fix” this by opening students’ eyes, but they can speak in such a way that the Lord might see fit to use leaders as a means to demonstrate the students’ need for the work of God in their lives.