Additional personal reflection questions from today’s Open House:
- What are some advantages to sorting through faith questions, struggles, and doubts in a community rather than doing so alone? Any disadvantages?
- How do you typically respond to doubts or objections to Christianity when they arise? Do you ignore it, crush it, feed it, study it, etc.?
- What are the key issues that make you uncomfortable with, or doubtful of, Christian beliefs? Have you recently had the opportunity to examine the grounds for your objections—i.e., to “doubt your doubts”? Have you had a similar opportunity to examine the basis for Christian beliefs?
- What can happen to faith communities that do not allow room for doubts and hard questions?
- Consider the following Madeleine L’Engle quotation (also found in your Sunday program): “Those who believe they believe in God but without passion in the heart, without anguish in the mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.” Does this challenge your notion of faith and what a healthy relationship with God ought to look like? How does she help us understand the positive benefits of wrestling with hard issues of faith?
- Consider the following quotation from Lee Strobel, a former atheist: “For me, having lived much of my life as an atheist, the last thing I want is a naïve faith built on a paper-thin foundation of wishful thinking or make-believe. I need a faith that’s consistent with reason, not contradictory to it; I want beliefs that are grounded in reality, not detached from it. I need to find once and for all whether the Christian faith can stand up to scrutiny.” Do you resonate with these words? What’s the difference between a “naïve faith,” as Strobel describes it, and true faith? What are the limits of reason in our spiritual journeys? If you are a Christian, are you afraid that the Christian faith might not stand up to scrutiny?