All of us have questions, we just don’t always feel like we can bring them up in church. At the Awakening, we want to change that. We want to provide a forum where you can ask questions you’ve often wondered about, but weren’t sure you could ask in church. This Sunday, June 20th, marks the first “Banned Questions Sunday” at the Awakening.
The basic idea is for you to bring any questions you have about the Bible or Christianity or Jesus or religion, however “blasphemous” or “heretical” people may or may not think them to be, so that an Awakening roundtable consisting of ministers and others might respond to them. We’ll start with the question about whether demons or the devil exist, and then go from there. The only questions that are off-limits for the Awakening are those that aren’t age appropriate for all ages in the room, for reasons that are obvious enough.
And remember: At the Awakening, we are trying to live out the conviction that love, not doctrine, holds us together, and that it’s possible to embody a community that consists of those who believe in God some of the time, or none of the time, or all of the time. Our faithfulness is expressed in lives that embody love and respect for all people, not in making sure that everybody believes the same things or that there is one “right” answer.
Viewing the website and writing this on the train to Chicago using my iPad. How cool is that! The banned questions idea is a great one and very well presented in this post. I am wondering what the overall response was. The time on Sunday went by very fast and, from my point of view, served only as an appetizer to a feast. Having set the table, you might want to consider coming back to this as a multiple-week series. That would give people time to ask questions and build interest and give your team the opportunity to sustain and improve the discussion over the course of several successive Sundays. It would be interesting to have select discussions of “banned questions” as a podcast or on NPR. Well done.