Description: 28-29th November 2008
Living The Questions Expo
Renfield St Stephen's Centre, 260 Bath Street, Glasgow.
The Living The Questions Expo was a taster event (Saturday) for potential LTQ users, as well as a consultation (Friday & Saturday) for potential & past users of the LTQ programmes. LTQ Expo 28-29 Nov 2008....An aide memoire of issues raised & discussed
Recruitment & publicity- How to find people who would be receptive:
- … personal invitations
- … selective
- … aim for mix of viewpoints/ positions.
- By open invitation, you’d troll 1000 to get 20. A formal invitation, gets a better response.
- It’s perhaps hard to capture the essence of LTQ in fliers, so a personal approach (in order to be able to explain) is better. But we need to be honest and up-front about what’s in store/ what the programme contains.
- How do you adequately flag up the questioning aspect & the need to become comfortable with uncertainty of LTQ? Is it a question of ‘straplines‘?
- eg. ‘If you edit Bible stories when reading them to your children, then this course is for you.’
- ‘You can be a Christian in a different way.‘
- ‘LTQ: cheaper than Alpha!‘
Context- Perhaps not merely specific to LTQ, but the social setting in which a programme is run is important. Particularly crucial if wanting to allow the disenchanted or sceptical to feel included?
- Examples: NOT a church hall;
- house;
- local hotel (one group hired a room and finger buffet, at £3 each)
- local pub.
- Frequency of meetings… a tendency towards once fortnightly as more manageable? The LTQ 1 12-session programme was perhaps more advantageous, whereas the 21 week LTQ 2 implied a year… tho‘ of course, this might increase group-bonding… hard to say at this point as no-one had yet completed the LTQ2 programme. It was pointed out that LTQ2 had 3 sections of 7, which could be more flexibly used.
Pros, cons & issues?
- Over-riding excitement and deep gratitude for the materials.
- A huge sense of relief when using the materials because you’re enabled/ allowed to ask questions, and given the possibility of creating an open forum for this (the high quality of the contributors and content helps too).
- This also reminds us that Jesus never said he was ‘the Answer’, but ‘the Way’; and more often than not, he replied to questions, not with definitive answers, but with more questions.
- Relief at not needing to live a ‘secret double-life‘ as a person with questions.
- Relief at knowing others are asking the questions we always wanted to ask (or we were helped to articulate questions we had deep down, but hadn’t identified).
- Relief at knowing that ‘I’m not alone‘.
- It’s a much-needed counter-cultural programme (just like Christianity should be…?). This is in the way it aims for active participants, rather than passive consumers. The latter constituency is the legacy that Victorian church practice has left us. It’s also the state that Late Capitalism aims to create in the population in order to maximise compliance and to fulfil its own ends….
- Fellowship & community building, both, in groups and across groups. LTQ enables sharing of journey with others.
- Being able to agree to disagree is a desired situation to encourage and enable. It’s positive to allow recognition that uniformity is neither necessary nor in fact, desirable.
- Positively, LTQ upsets folk in a way the Church avoids. But some folk aren’t able to deal with uncertainty, as they’ve been trained to expect answers. So it’s important to strike a balance between disturbance and pastoral care if folk are too disturbed.
- It’s important to understand that LTQ requires or assumes a relatively sophisticated understanding or knowledge before starting the course. How do we address that? Is there a gap to be filled here, or is LTQ a follow-up for more ‘preliminary’ courses?... perhaps a ‘Framing The Questions’/ ‘access-course’?
Some issues for UK supplementary material?
- Some issues/ situations in LTQ are more culturally-bound (eg. The Rapture; death penalty). However, these are not absolutely inaccessible or too difficult to understand. But it also raises the likelihood that there might be more specific UK (or even Scottish/ English/ Irish etc.) issues that could be addressed.
- Some areas (like Process Theology) perhaps need a bit more background.
- An area where folk identified supplementary material would be useful was the provision of more activity-based exercises. Also some questions (at least in LTQ 1) could have been less ‘closed’/ more ‘open’.
- Perhaps there could be more suggestions for practical/ action ways to take stuff forward?
- There could perhaps be more inclusion of lay people’s views/ questions etc.
- The proportionally higher ‘un-churched’/ sceptical/ post-Christian population in the UK, and the possibilities LTQ offers as one interface is more specifically a UK issue (and again, probably more so in England too). This raises the question whether (for this purpose) the assumption of LTQ that users are Christian is helpful.
- So this in turn raises the question of ‘audiences’… inevitably any programme has limitations, and has certain assumptions. Just because there is a limitation, doesn’t make material bad (probably the opposite, given it may thus, be more focused). But an awareness of ‘audience’ may need to be more explicit in our minds.
- Other background issues to address (some more general philosophical):
What’s the nature of God (‘If there is a God?’) Who is Jesus? What is ‘knowledge’? (while being aware that there can be dangers in being too ‘intellectual’….)
- Identifying another ‘audience’/ constituency… is there a need for material for teenagers?
- There’s also a resource (in the Iona Community’s keeping) of the Scottish Open College’s teaching materials which might be good and appropriate to use.
Miscellaneous
- It’s instructive to experience the materials more than once, particularly as a participant first, and then a facilitator.
- One such person had, for example, found the session deconstructing the Nativity story very difficult the first time. One year later, as a facilitator, they reflected back and marvelled at how they’d then found these views on the Nativity so potentially problematic….
- Another person had been approached by non-church folk (who were also not interested in ‘Church‘), but who wanted to know more of faith & biblical issues, and told, ‚What are you going to do about it?‘. LTQ seemed the ideal solution…
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