Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. - Psalm 119:105
This article is about how small group leaders can help students make progress in a discussion. If small group leaders follow my recommendations, one of the issues that will crop up time and time again is that the group will find itself without answers to the questions being raised. Everyone becomes unsure of themselves, and so either people stop talking and the conversation begins to die, or different people begin to share their own opinions. But the Bible serves to trace a path to an answer.
Why is it that following my recommendations for leading small groups tends to lead to groups that fall silent or pool their ignorance? In the first place, it is because I recommend against feeding the group answers with leading or closed questions. I am advocating for allowing a group to discover its own collective ignorance.
Discovering Ignorance Is a Good Thing
Students are often encouraged to believe that they already know everything. There is an implicit assumption among many students that they should already know the answer to any question. After all, many of them grew up in church and have been acquainted with these things since they were small children. Too often, leaders ask questions that seem to imply this as well. The problem with this is that the students have rarely, if ever, begun to analyze, classify, or evaluate what they have learned since childhood. They have only very recently left childhood and simply haven’t had time. There has been little time to begin to think critically, that is, to compare alternative ideas or perspectives and weigh the relative merits of each one. Students have almost never considered the fact that there are different ways of seeing the world, and that knowing the information they learned in Sunday School is not the same as intentionally adopting it into the way they think and live.
In my experience, it is common for people learning to do things to be frustrated by a problem or assignment that they do not fully understand before they’ve even begun. In math, for example, it is common enough for students to be frustrated by the fact that they are not completely sure how to solve the problem before they have even begun to work it out. They look at it and despair because they do not see the entire path to the solution. However, part of what they need to learn to do is break problems into parts. They don’t have to have the entire map in their minds in order to take the first step. The same is true of students in small group. They don’t need to know the entire answer before they start talking. They need to learn to start to work it out, which means saying something to advance the conversation without taking the conversation all the way to its conclusion.
The foregoing discussion leads me to make a basic observation about learning that is relevant for small groups: learning often comes from the discomfort of discovering ignorance. While it is possible to learn new things without first perceiving a gaping hole in our understanding, that is not always how it works. Sometimes, we are simply stumped. We are asked a question, or we come upon a problem, and we do not know what to do. Does that mean we should accept our ignorance and simply stop? That is hardly ever the case. The fact that I am stumped now does not mean that I will stay stumped. I can begin to think about why I am stumped. What am I missing? It is like making a grocery list. If someone asked me right now, “What do you need from the store?”, I would be stumped. If I wanted to be able to answer that question, what should I do? I would need to begin exploring my pantry, cupboards, and refrigerator to see what I have and what I might be missing. Apart from exploring the necessary facts behind the question, I will remain stumped.
The Necessity of Scripture
How, then, does the Bible help? When the psalmist writes that God’s Word is a lamp to his feet and a light to his path, he means that God’s Word “lights up” the way he is going so that he can see where he is placing his feet and in what direction he is moving. This is a helpful picture of why tracing a path to an answer is necessary in small group discussions. Stay with the metaphor for a moment and think about what it is like to walk in a new place in the dark without a light. It is a disconcerting experience. You don’t know the terrain, you can’t see any potential obstacles, and you aren’t sure what is coming. How can you even know you are moving in the right direction? Contrast that with the moment that someone hands you a light. You point it at your feet, then a little ahead, and then you sweep the light around a bit. You sigh with relief, your shoulders relax, and you move forward with bold steps, your anxiety lifted like a burden off your shoulders. Students need this kind of well-grounded confidence as they make their way in the world. They need the light of Scripture to illuminate their surroundings and guide them on their journey.
Tracing a path to an answer, then, includes the basic idea that students need to be allowed to lose themselves. It is healthy for them to discover their inability to hold multiple ideas together in tension. They need to learn to do so as a basic function in life. Once they lose themselves in a discussion, it is often necessary for the leader to lead them back to a path that is fruitful for discussion. Once a problem is discerned and defined, a path can be traced to a potential answer. An answer is only potential because it is common for a problem to morph into something else or result in a dead end. The important part of this step in the conversation is that students begin to pick their way forward from the point of the problem or issue to a biblical perspective.
Once they have defined the problem, students often resort to their gut or what seems right to them. When students begin to talk from their gut, the leader has a crucial role to play in helping the group to see the necessity of grounding answers in Scripture rather than what seems right in their own eyes. It is not that students see themselves as authoritative, necessarily, such that their word is intentionally elevated against God’s. It is more that they are doing what they are accustomed to, which is to look to themselves for guidance. Why do they do this? One reason is that they are more aware of what they think and how they feel about many issues than they are of what God says in Scripture. In short, they know the content of their own minds much better than the Bible. They are either ignorant of the Bible or unable to recite the Bible for help in thinking.[1]
Leaders should focus on helping the students know how to think more than on what to think. Often, but not always, a particular passage may offer an answer to a students’ dilemma. Other times, it is not so much a specific chapter and verse as a basic doctrinal point that has become muddled or forgotten in the students’ minds. One of the most common basic ideas that students forget or fail to keep in mind is the transcendence of God. Many questions are made tricky or even unanswerable when God’s transcendence is neglected, forgotten, or distorted. God’s transcendence refers to His eternality, infinitude, immensity, and unity, among other concepts. Many times, a discussion among students will, for example, reduce God to someone infinitely powerful, perhaps, but mostly like us in other respects. That will not do, and many different passages can serve to correct that misapprehension of the nature and action of God.
What Tracing a Path Looks Like
When I say that small group leaders should trace a path to an answer, I am referring to the need for students to be led by Scripture out from their current place of thinking to a place where their thinking is firmly grounded in Scripture. In small groups, the leader has the chance to do more than tell the students what they ought to think; they have a chance to show the students how to think, which is equally important. For the students to learn how to think, they need to receive guidance from the leaders about a potential path for their problems without being spoon-fed the biblical information. What I am describing is like helping a child learn to walk or ride a bike. They must do it themselves, but you can be there to catch them while falling until they are stable enough not to need you. This is the goal with students, and it leads to dynamic and interesting discussions that the leaders will not be able to predict, largely because the students themselves don’t yet know how to think. Tracing a path to an answer requires the leaders to understand both Scripture and the students. Arguably, the former is easier than the latter, and it is a question of leading the latter to the former that is at issue.
In sum, tracing a path to an answer is perhaps one of the hardest things to do in small group discussions. Leaders seek to understand the students, which is hard, while also keeping Scripture and thinking in line with Scripture as the goal. Leaders avoid giving the answer, but don’t leave the students lost either. Leaders also avoid asking leading questions in which the answers are embedded in the question. The students have to be allowed to consider open questions for which their answers cannot be predicted. All of this is difficult, but it is also highly rewarding. Once students begin to get it, the conversations not only become more biblically grounded, but they also become more interesting. New questions open up and fresh challenges are discovered. The more well-worn the path to the Bible becomes, the more solid the students’ thinking also becomes. And as that happens, their worldview often takes on a much more stable shape, because it is increasingly conformed to God’s Word rather than the world’s.
[1] This is one major reason that we want to encourage Bible memorization. The ability to recall biblical text relevant to a situation is a great aid to thinking, and thus living, biblically.