Archive: Questions for 2022-2023
Week of 4/9 - Easter!
1) When you think of resurrection, what comes to mind? What reference points for resurrection do you have in your daily life?
2) Sunday’s message had a quote from Catherine of Sienna, a Spanish mystic from the Middle Ages who said, “the soul’s infinite DESIRE for God—which she described as a “ravenous hunger”—is the only infinite thing we can offer to an infinite God. “The soul can’t help but love. She always wants to love something because love is the stuff she is made of.” How have you experienced this sort of infinite desire in your life? How does it impact you to consider that God is PRO-desire, rightly directed?
3) What do you think about the idea that the places in our lives where Jesus feels ABSENT may be places where Jesus is at work AHEAD of us? Is this idea encouraging? Challenging? Why?
4) On Sunday, we discussed the 3 levels of growth from Outdoor Wilderness Training: the comfort zone, challenge zone, and death zone. How would you define each of these zones in your own life? Have you had any experiences where you felt like you were living right in a healthy challenge zone space in your faith journey with God…one marked by delight, terror, and growth?
5) Sunday’s message concluded by asking us to consider 3 different invitations from Jesus: 1) to believe in the Easter message of resurrection for the first time, 2) to embrace Jesus as LORD and not just Savior, or 3) to step forward into living as God’s co-missionary. Do you feel like God extended one of these invitations to you? Do you feel like God had a different invitation for you?
Week of 3/26 - Jesus’ Cry from the Cross, “My God My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?”
1) David Roseberry said that “even if we can’t relate to Jesus’s suffering, we can all relate to Jesus’s question: why?” What things in your life or in the world around you have caused you to turn to God and ask “why?”
2) In Sunday’s message, we discussed how athletes and musicians practice the fundamentals of their sport and musical craft so that in the games and concerts when the pressures on, they’re able to perform well. Is there anything in your life that you practice regularly during the ordinary days of your life to prepare for a moment when the skills you’ve developed will be urgently needed in a way that will matter? What connections do you see between this practice and your faith, especially when it comes to the practices of Scripture reading and prayer?
3) On Sunday we heard the story that prompted St. John of the Cross to write his spiritual poem “the dark night of the soul.” Have you ever had a “dark night of the soul” experience when you felt God was absent and/or that everyone around you was against you? How did you handle it?
4) One of the main points from Sunday’s message is that what we pour into us on the ordinary days of our lives will come out of us in crisis. How have you experienced this in your own life: for better or for worse?
5) Sometimes the crisis moments of life are our OWN that we go through, and sometimes the crises we encounter happen in the lives of people close to us. Have you ever experienced your daily spiritual practices to give you something meaningful of God to offer someone else in crisis? What was that experience like?
6) How can others (potentially in this group) encourage you in your own practices of Scripture reading and prayer?
Week of 3/19 - Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer (John 17)
1) How would you characterize your prayer life on the spectrum of religious (connected with God, detached from the world) to irreligious (connected with the world, detached from God)?
2) In what ways do you need to learn from Jesus in order to engage intimately with God and deeply with the world?
3) What comes to mind when you pray for "the mission of the church?" Do you think of the totality of the mission or narrower aspects of it? How might you remember the breadth and depth of the mission in your prayer life?
4) Direct Quote from the sermon, italicized portions are for the leaders to aid discussion if needed: "Do you find yourself facing burnout or running out of steam? Perhaps you need to spend more time praying for your own participation in the mission. Or on the other hand, do you spend so much time in prayer, meditation, and isolation that you never enter into the world? Perhaps you need to spend more time praying for God to send you into the world.
5) What is the source of our oneness with God and one another? Do your prayer life lead you into a deeper sense of oneness with fellow Christians? If not, why do you think that is?
Week of 3/12 - Jesus’ Prayer in Gethsemane (Matthew 26)
1) Today’s passage is particularly emotionally impactful. What part of the passage particularly stands out to you, impacts you?
2) Do you find it easy or difficult to hear from God? What helps you hear from the Lord? What helps you know that you are actually hearing from God and not just your own desires or imaginations? Do you have a story of when you clearly heard from the Lord?
3) In your prayer life, do you tend to share your whole range of emotions with God? If so or if not, why? Why is it important to share your emotions with the Lord in prayer? Do you have a time when you shared very raw emotions with God? What was that prayer experience like?
4) Have you ever been taught that it is okay to wrestle with the Lord in prayer? What does it look like to wrestle with God and do you have a story of a time you wrestled with the Lord? What was that experience like?
5) What makes it difficult to surrender or relinquish your desires over to God? Do you have story of a time when you relinquished something over to the Lord? Did you ever submit to God in a way like Jesus that entailed future pain? What was that prayer experience like? How did you feel afterwards?
6) When Jesus prayed in Gethsemane, he brought along 3 disciples to keep vigil with him. Do you have people who regularly pray for you? Support you in challenging times? Are vulnerable with you and allow you to be vulnerable with them? What are these relationships like?
Week of 3/5 - The Lord’s Prayer
Prayer Practice this Week: Spend more time this week as a group in prayer. During your final prayer together, spend some time lingering over each line of the Lord’s Prayer. As a leader, read it line by line, pausing for a few minutes after each line to give people space to pray out loud or silently. If you need some prompts as you go line by line, look to the exercises we are doing as a church this Lent involving the Lord’s prayer, which you can find here.
Week of 2/26 - Prayer / Luke 18:1-8, The Parable of the Widow and the Judge
1) If someone were to ask you "what is prayer?" what would you say?
2) How have you meaningfully practiced prayer in your life? Have you experienced a connection between your specific prayer practices and a growing heart attitude of connection to God? How?
3) What does the word "persistence" make you think of?
4) Do you have any stories from your life when your persistence led to a positive outcome for you?
5) Do you find God's character to be a motivation for persistence in prayer? Why or why not?
6) Do you struggle with the fact that God's response to our prayers often seems unclear or slow? That His justice seems so long in coming? If so, how have you processed that struggle in and through your faith journey?
7) What are you hoping for this Lenten season?
2/19/23 - John 8, The Woman Caught in Adultery
1) Are you familiar with this passage/have you heard this passage preached before? If so, how does it shape or change your view of the passage to think about the 3 audiences—Pharisees, woman, and crowds—instead of just focusing on the woman caught in adultery?
2) One of the interesting tensions at play in this passage is the relationship between law and grace. How do you understand or think about the relationship between law and grace in the ministry of Jesus? In your own faith journey?
3) Have you ever had an experience where you were a “rock thrower” when it came to sharing your faith with others? Have you ever had an experience where something caused you to “lay down your rocks” and change the way you thought about evangelism? If so, describe these experiences.
4) How do you understand the difference between shame and guilt in you own faith journey? Have you had an experience where Jesus freed you from shame?
5) How have you understood the relationship between public justice and moral transformation when it comes to the Gospel of Jesus?
Week of 2/12/23 - John 4, the Woman at the Well
1) If you have been in the church for a while, was there anything new or different in this week’s portrayal of the Samaritan woman? If so, how did you grow up viewing the Samaritan woman? Have your views of her changed at all after this week’s sermon? If so, how?
2) When Jesus encountered the Samaritan woman, she left feeling dignified, seen, respected, refreshed, and renewed by Jesus. When have you left feeling dignified, seen, respected, refreshed, and renewed by other Christians? How specifically does Jesus dignify you, see you, and leave you refreshed and renewed?
3) The word used in the New Testament for hospitality is philoxenos, a word composed of two parts, philo (friendship or love) and xenos (stranger). Who are the strangers in your lives? Who are the messy ones? Do you tend to embrace them or avoid them? Why or why not? What does it concretely look like to love strangers? What does it concretely look like to love people in our lives who make us a bit uncomfortable or who don’t seem to have their lives together or whose lives and culture seem strange to us?
4) Now, imagine a conversation where you are sharing your faith.
What would you do to communicate to that person that you see them and hear them and want to know them?
What kinds of questions would you ask so that they could get in touch with their deepest desires?
How would you cultivate an atmosphere where they felt respected and could share honestly about their questions and doubts?
What would you do if their lives exhibited clearly sinful behaviors?
What would it like for you to be vulnerable in these conversations?
5) Rev. Kristen said the following, “An outwardly put together or even moral life is not necessarily a sign that one is oriented towards God and moving towards Him in continuous surrender, obedience, and love. And likewise, an outwardly messy life is not necessarily a sign that one is oriented away from God. In fact, a messy person may be more dependent upon God’s mercies because of life circumstances and therefore more oriented to God and making more progress in surrender, obedience, and love, despite the areas of their lives they have not yet surrendered to Him.”
What did she mean by this? Do you have examples of this in your own relationships?
Week of 11/6/22 - Revelation 5
1) In Sunday’s sermon, Fr. William said that American Christians have often read the Bible as a “rule book” or a “manual for life.” Instead, he encouraged us to see the Bible as a library of different types of literature written by people from many different cultures who encountered God at work in their lives and surrounding worlds…that together becomes one singular STORY telling us what is true about the world and about our lives. How have you understood the Bible? How might your relationship with the Bible and the way you read it change if you adopted the STORY view?
2) Fr. William said that the Book of Revelation is less a secret code giving a play by play of the end of the world and more a revelation of Jesus—showing followers of Jesus living in Rome and us today who Jesus really is and what’s really true about us and about our world right now. How have you understood Revelation in your life and faith journey? Is this way of looking at it new to you? If so, how does it change how your relate to and engage Revelation?
3) Is it Good News to you or to the world, that Jesus is worthy to rule over all creation? Why or why not? How might you share this news with others?
4) Fr. William contrasted the character & kingship of Jesus to that of Roman Emperor Nero. What does it mean to you that Jesus is not like Nero? How is this Good News, either for you or for the world?
5) How have you experienced Jesus show up in the midst of your distress in your own life and faith journey? What did that experience teach you about God?
10/30/22 - Mary’s Song - Luke 1:46–55
1) In this week’s Scripture, we see Mary showing humility in pointing away from herself and giving the focus of the song to God. How would you define humility? What does it practically look like, and how can we cultivate it in our lives? Can you think of people in your lives who exude humility? What do their lives look like?
2) In her song, Mary rejoices in the Lord. As Christians today, do you think we rejoice in the Lord enough? If yes or no, how so? What would it look like for us more fully give ourselves into rejoicing, both individually and collectively?
3) In his sermon, Brady asked whether we would be on the side of the lowly or the rich sent away empty. In what ways, do you see yourselves as the rich? In what ways, do you see yourselves as lowly? What would it look like to become more lowly?
4) Mary’s song is sung with an expectation that God will do many great things. Have you ever heard anyone speak with Mary’s sort of confidence about who God is or how He will act in the world? What was your response to this confidence? Increasing faith? Skepticism? And what does it look like to speak with confidence about God’s character and actions in this world in light of our very broken world? In other words, what is the good news we have to share with others in the midst of this brokenness?
Week of 10/23/22 - Habakkuk 3
1) Have you ever written your personal prayers/interactions with God down in words – poetry, story, or song? What was that experience like? Did you share this with others? How did they respond?
2) In his prayer to God, Habakkuk remember God’s character and His deeds of old. What are some examples of ways that God has cared for you, delivered you, set you free, protected you, or showed his delight in you in the past?
3) What is joy? How does our culture at large define it? How do we as Christians define it? Do you remember what Rev. Kristen said about how we cultivate joy in the midst of difficult circumstances? What does it look like?
4) Are there any people in your life who have modeled well what it looks like to trust, hope, and experience joy even in the midst of difficult circumstances?
5) Spending time with the Lord – whether it is in lament, rest, remembrance of who He is and what His promises are – is important for all disciples. What does it personally look like for you to spend time with the Lord? What makes it difficult for you to spend time with the Lord? What helps you spend time with the Lord?
6) Though God promises that all things will be well at the end of time, what are some things in your life or in the world that you wish God would do something about now? Do you bring these things to the Lord in lament, and if so, what does that look like?
Some quotes about joy from the sermon
Sometimes, joy does manifest itself as certain emotions and feelings, and sometimes it does not. Sometimes, joy arises in relationship to our external circumstances – circumstances that are good and right and beautiful, as God would have them to be, and sometimes it emerges despite our external circumstances. When it comes down to it, joy can include all the things I mentioned above, but none of these things get to the heart of what joy is. For joy is not primarily about feelings or choices we make. Joy is a Fruit of the Spirit – a gift of God cultivated internally in our souls that transforms our hearts, our relationships, and our interactions with the world. In the words of Dallas Williard, “. . . it is a pervasive, constant, and unending sense of well-being that flows from vision, peace, righteousness, and hope.”
For joy is not primarily about feelings or choices we make. Joy is a Fruit of the Spirit – a gift of God cultivated internally in our souls that transforms our hearts, our relationships, and our interactions with the world. In the words of Dallas Williard, “. . . it is a pervasive, constant, and unending sense of well-being that flows from vision, peace, righteousness, and hope.”
In other words, joy is not a fleeting experience but is a condition of our hearts grounded in our trust in the Lord and implanted in us by the Holy Spirit– a deep knowing in our souls that “all is well and will be well with the world” – that God loves us and has good plans for us and for our world no matter what our current circumstances or the state of the world might be.
It is in abiding in Christ where joy is to be found. And this makes perfect sense, for you see, God in his very being is joy and is the source of all joy. The theologian Karl Barth talked about God as being One who is radiant with joy, as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit continually delight in each other, and as this delight overflows outwardly and into the hearts of all who abide in Him.
As Henri Nouwen has said, “Joy is the experience of knowing that . . . [we] are unconditionally loved and that nothing – sickness, failure, emotional distress, oppression, war or even death – can take that love away.” “Joy is based on the spiritual knowledge that, while the world in which we live is shrouded in darkness, God has overcome the world.”
Week of 10/16/22 - Hosea 14
1) What has been your experience of the word "repentance?" Positive or negative connotations?
2) Share a meaningful experience of interpersonal reconciliation (friendship, marriage, etc.) What did it cost?
3) The central metaphor of Hosea is one of marriage. Paul also uses this language for the relationship between Christ and the Church. What makes this an effective metaphor? (Bear in mind not all of us experience marriage and those who do don't necessarily experience good marriage, in the same way that God identifies himself as father, but not all of us have positive connotations of fatherhood.)
4) In verse 1, the imperative verb is "return." What does this say about how our relationship with God was designed to be?
5) In verse 4, God says, "I will love them freely (or voluntarily.)" How does this statement shape the way you understand who God is?
6) How might daily repentance shape your life? What can you do to incorporate repentance into your daily prayer life? Are there resources you can share with others to experience the power of confession and repentance?
Week of 10/1/22 - Lamentations 1:1-8, Jeremiah 29:4-7
1. When you hear the word lament, what comes to mind? Is what Charles shared in his sermon new to you? If so, in what way?
2. Charles quoted Soong Chan-Rah definition of Lament:
“Laments are prayers of petition arising out of need. But lament is not simply the presentation of a list of complaints, nor merely the expression of sadness over difficult times.” He continues, “Lament in the Bible is a liturgical response to the reality of suffering and engages God in the context of pain and trouble”
What in this quote stands out to you when thinking about lament?
3. When you think about suffering that is happening in the world or personally, do you look at it as something to deal by yourself or corporately? How could lament shift our response?
4. How could we as a church shift more in a lamentive response to understand our world and each other's pain better? How would it better guide us in how we lean into our neighbors' hurts and pains?
5. Read Jeremiah 29: 1-7
How does this text reflect lament? How can it shape how we view our situations or seasons when going through them?
Week 9/25/22 - Isaiah 65:17-25
1) At the beginning of her sermon, Rev. Kristen quoted Corrie ten Boom, “What feeds the soul matters as much as what feeds the body.” How do you spend time feeding your soul? What makes it difficult to find time and space to feed your soul, and what would help you to find this time? What are the particular practices that have helped you in the past feed your soul?
2) In a follow-up to the last question, what practices have helped you to hold onto God’s promises, contemplate beauty, and find meaning and purpose in your life? What helps you hold onto faith, beauty, and love when the world around you is messy and falling apart? What would you say is the role of beauty in the life of faith?
3) Can you remember what the Biblical vision of the afterlife/new heavens and new earth that Rev. Kristen spoke about in her sermon is? What does this afterlife look like? Does this vision match the vision of the afterlife spoken about in your previous churches/Christian communities? How is this vision similar or different than what you have previously been taught/believed? How can this vision provide you with hope in your day-to-day lives?
4) In her sermon, Rev. Kristen stated that local church should be the place in every town where creativity, creation-care, and the work for justice is central and where this work then flows out in blessing to the surrounding community. Have you experienced the church in this way? In what ways? What would it look like for the local church to better live into the vision of being a center of creativity, justice, and creation-care?
Excerpts about our future hope from the sermon:
. . . this Kingdom would be a return to, restoration, and a fuller blossoming of Eden, that place where the first humans continually lived in intimacy with God. Indeed, there would be a new heavens and new earth where that ancient snake who wreaked so much havoc in the first garden would eat dust and where the animals would live in harmony, the people would not die prematurely, and the people would enjoy the fruits of their labor. Indeed, all the curses for disobedience outlined in Deuteronomy 28, curses such as losing children and not enjoying one’s home and vineyards, would be reversed. As such, this future kingdom would be full of great rejoicing. As for the former things of life, including suffering, distress, violence, and weeping, they would be no more and would not even be remembered.
. . .In Isaiah’s messages of hope, he makes clear that God would remain faithful to his people, even considering what they were about to face. Yes, judgement would come in the form of the Exile, but in the grand sweep of God’s timing, this judgment would be just a blip in time. For one day, God would restore His people and fulfill all His promises to them. This restoration would begin with the coming of the Suffering Servant and Messianic King who would die to atone for the sins of His people and would culminate in the establishment of an everlasting Kingdom of blessing for the Jews, as well as for all nations.
. . . with the arrival of Jesus, the hope for this Kingdom would be sparked once again. It would become extremely clear to the early Christians that Jesus was Isaiah’s prophesied Messianic King and Suffering Servant, and through John’s Revelation on Patmos, it would be clear that Isaiah’s hope of a New Heavens and New Earth would still come to pass. God loved His people and would absolutely be faithful to His promises, however, His people had to wait just a little longer.
In the meantime, the Christians could look for signs of the Kingdom breaking forth throughout the earth, be guided and strengthened by the Holy Spirit, and most importantly, sustain great hope in midst of terrible persecutions in the first few centuries of Christianity. For they knew that one day, the New Jerusalem would come down to earth, all tears would be wiped away, and the earth would be restored to what God had originally intended for it when He first created it. This would be Eden renewed and fulfilled. This would be the complete merging back together of Heaven and Earth, the place where God reigns and the place where people dwell. And this vision gave the Christians meaning and purpose, and filled them with great love, so much so that many were willing to lay down their own lives for the sake of God and the sake of others.
Our souls do not escape the earth and float off to heaven, but rather at the end of time, our bodies, united to our souls, will be resurrected, and we will dwell forever thereafter in the New Creation, the place where heaven and earth have come to completely overlap. These new bodies and new creation will look different than what we now experience because they will now dwell under God’s perfect rule and continual presence. At the same time, they will have continuity with our present bodies and present earth. As such, what we do with our bodies and earth during our present lives very much matters; in fact, how we tend to them (or not tend to them) reverberates throughout all eternity.
Week 9/18/22 - Song of Songs 8:6-7, Revelation 3:14-22
1) Have you ever heard the Song of Songs preached on or spent much time studying it before in Bible Studies or your own devotional reading? If so, how have you thought about this book of the Bible before? If not, what’s made you avoid it or not be interested in it?
2) If you are married or single, what tools or resources do you think you need in this season and your current station to help you pursue and share healthy relational connections with others—friends, your spouse, etc.? How do you think the church can be a part of resourcing or equipping people in different life-stages to share healthy relationships?
3) This past Sunday Fr. William shared a quote that said, “What’s been wounded in community can be healed in community.” Do you believe that’s true? Why or why not? Have you ever experienced this in your own life? If yes, how so?
4) Jesus’s heart is to restore our connectedness to God and others and to remove shame. How have you seen or experienced the church live out this heart of Jesus well? How would you desire to see us grow at The Mission to live out this heart of Jesus better?
5) The sermon ended with the argument that no matter whether we currently find ourselves single or married our destiny in the Kingdom of God is to live as the BELOVED of God and Jesus desires to help us experience that identity NOW. How does this knowledge of your destiny in Christ as God’s beloved matter for or shape your life today? How might you grow in your daily awareness of this destiny?
Week 9/11/22 - Psalm 121
1) How would you define “faith” from your own experience? Do you think of faith as a journey or something else? If something else, what category do you find helpful?
2) In Sunday’s sermon, Fr. William mentioned 4 stages of the spiritual journey as defined by Belden Lane: the departure, the discipline, the descent, and the delight. Do you feel you’ve experienced any of these stages in your own faith? Which stage do you find yourself in now? (See summary of these stages below.)
3) Have you had any moments in your faith when something happened that showed you God had been present in your life over the past season, when before you’d thought He had been absent? If so, what were those moments? How did God change your perception?
4) Has experiencing God personally gotten harder for you over time or easier? What factors either in your own life or in the world around you do you think have contributed to this?
5) Sunday’s sermon referenced Psalm 84 and the phrase “blessed are those who set their hearts on pilgrimage.” Pilgrimage is a historic spiritual discipline that many Christians continue to practice today, by entering intentionally into a journey of a specific duration to a place for which they can articulate spiritual meaning. Have you ever gone on a pilgrimage? If so, why did you go? What was the experience like for you?
Summary of 4 Stages
“In his book “Backpacking with the Saints,” Belden Lane surveys the work of some of the most famous and influential voices from Christian history—St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, the Desert mothers and fathers, Martin Luther, Julian of Norwich, Thomas Merton—and shows how all of these saints experienced faith as a JOURNEY marked by 4 distinct phases. Phase 1 was called “departure,” where a desire or hunger is sparked deep in your heart in a way that causes you to set out on a journey. Phase 2 was called “discipline,” recognizing that any journey of significant meaning or scope will be hard and will require a discipline to sustain over time. Phase 3 was called the “descent,” a season of painful disorientation, every journeyer experiences in the context of any meaningful pursuit…when the going gets tough, the destination feels impossibly far, and you wonder if you should just give up. Phase 4 is called the delight, where you emerge on the other side of the descent with a renewed vision for the world, a deepened joy and contentedness as you continue on. This cycle may happen once over the entire lifetime of faith, or it may happen repeatedly.” Fr. William Eavenson