This section can be found starting on Page 267 of OPEN CHRISTIANITY. Study groups in churches and homes across the country use the book to explore these questions.

Questions for Reflection

by Chapter

for Use by Study Groups

Chapter 1. Why Another Road?

1. What is your relationship to the Christian religion today?

2. In what ways have you, or others you know, been helped or harmed by exposure or involvement with traditional, "closed" Christianity?

3. Do you think it is helpful or harmful to believe that Christianity is the only true religion and that Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation?

Chapter 2. My Story: Discovering Open Christianity

1. What is the story of your own faith journey? Describe the critical turning points along your way so far.

2. Where do you think your path is leading you now?

Chapter 3. Keeping Faith

1. When have you discovered that you had "raw" faith?

2. When have you discovered that you had faith "in" something or someone?

3. What makes faith "Christian"?

4. In what ways do you live "only if"?

5. In what ways do you live "as if"?

Chapter 4. God: An Introduction

1. Keep silence for at least 15 minutes, compassionately observing your own feelings and thoughts and urges. Describe this experience.

2. When and how have you directly experienced God?

3. What names do you use for God, and in which contexts do you use them?

Chapter 5. God: Knowing or Believing?

1. What God or gods don’t you believe in?

2. What do you know about God, if anything?

Chapter 6. Jesus: Unique and Universal

1. What is the difference between you and your ego or personality?

2. What is the difference between Jesus and the Christ?

3. What is the difference between the Jesus you know today and the Jesus you knew as a child?

4. What aspects of the Jesus you know and love today do you consider likely to be historically accurate?

5. Does it matter to you whether or not the Jesus of your heart is the Jesus of history?

6. What is your interpretation of John 14:6: "No man comes to the Father except through me."

Chapter 7. Spirit: Watching Whirlwinds

1. When and how have you encountered Spirit?

2. When have you had to discern the difference between malevolent spirit and Holy Spirit?

3. How do your community, friends, and family help you to discern spirits?

Chapter 8. The Gospel Truth

1. How would you tell the "gospel truth" in one short paragraph?

2. Write a parable that expresses the gospel as you see it.

3. When and how have you been "gospelized"—given a window into the kingdom of heaven?

Chapter 9. The Fig Tree: Another Reading of the Bible

1. What would you have done if Dirty Bill had asked you the question about the fig tree story?

2. Has God ever spoken or written through your voice or hands? When and how have you been a channel for the Word of God?

3. Choose a passage from the New Testament and interpret it midrashically—freely, poetically, loosely, creatively. Try to interpret the New Testament in the same way that Jesus interpreted the Old Testament!

Chapter 10. Scripture and Freedom

1. Does the Bible have authority over your life? If so, how?

2. What is the difference between "spirituality" and "religion"?

3. What is your relationship to the Bible? How has that relationship evolved over time?

4. What kind of authority do we need in order to practice our faith?

Chapter 11. Death, Resurrection, and Eternal Life

1. How do you view life, death, and afterlife? What personal experiences have shaped your view?

2. What do you want your own death to be like? How does this reflect what you want your life to be like?

3. In what ways have you experienced "resurrection" as part of grief?

4. Is Christian faith dependent on belief in the literal resurrection of Jesus’ physical body?

5. Do you think Christianity itself needs to be resurrected from literalism?

Chapter 12. A New Story of the Universe

1. Are science and religion integrally related, or are they completely separate but equally valid ways of looking at the world?

2. What is your version of the story of the universe? How would you tell it in a few paragraphs?

3. What kind of "fish" ornaments would you put on the back of your car?

4. How does the divorce of science from religion affect your daily life? How does it affect the culture that surrounds you?

5. When have you found yourself "re-enchanted," re-connecting the physical and the spiritual dimensions of life?

Chapter 13. Good, Evil, and the Will of God

1. Tell about a time when you were sure you knew the will of God, and also about a time when your confidence in your knowledge of God’s will was shattered.

2. Is evil an expression of the will of God? Or is evil our fault, a result of our fall in the Garden of Eden? Is there even such a thing as evil at all?

3. How do you discern the will of God?

Chapter 14. Original Grace: The Road Beyond Sin

1. Why did Jesus die? For your sins? Because the Romans thought he was a rabble-rouser? What does his death signify to you?

2. When have you had to take up your cross? When have you had to sacrifice your ego for the sake of love?

Chapter 15. Another Way to Face the Cross

1. Look at crucifixes or images of the cross—a variety of them, some with Jesus on them, others without. How do you feel? How does your body and soul react to each of these images?

2. What things or people in your day-to-day world are "crucifixes"?

3. How has your relationship to the image of the cross evolved over your lifetime?

Chapter 16. Another Road to Conversion

1. Have you ever experienced conversion? If so, what was it like?

2. What conversion stories in other people’s lives have had a profound effect on you?

Chapter 17. Coming Home to Spiritually Centered Community

1. What is your spiritual community?

2. How does your spiritual community affect your own experience of faith?

3. What are the peaks and the pitfalls of life in a church or other faith community?

Chapter 18. A Walk With God

1. What is your spiritual discipline?

2. What is difficult and what is pleasurable about it?

Chapter 19. Coming Home to Worship

1. How do your body, soul, and intellect react to worship?

2. Which parts of Christian worship are particularly meaningful and powerful for you? How does this reflect where you are on your spiritual journey?

3. Create an order of worship that you think would express your own spirituality. Then create one that you think would be meaningful to your faith community. What is the difference between the two, if any?

Chapter 20. Inward Mobility: Rites and Passages

1. What have been the most important and powerful rituals that you have gone through in your life? How did these rituals affect you?

2. Which traditional Christian rituals are most helpful and powerful for you, and which are problematic?

3. When have you seen the Spirit move among people in a ritual?

Chapter 21. Bread and Wine: Symbol and Reality

1. Share bread and wine in a group, and take special care to experience the tastes, textures, and aromas. Is Jesus present for you in this ritual? Is it real, or symbolic, for you?

2. In what ways are body and soul separated in your own life? What are the effects of this separation on your physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being?

3. What rituals or practices bring body and soul together for you?

Chapter 22. Another Way to Pray

1. Repeat the Lord’s Prayer slowly, meditating on each line for a while. How does it speak for you, and in what ways does it go right over your head?

2. What is your own practice of prayer?

3. What stories can you tell about intercessory prayer (praying for others)?

4. When have you been like Hannah—waiting for an answer that never comes? And when have you been like St. Paul, letting the Spirit pray for you, letting prayer be its own answer?

Chapter 23. Faith and Healing

1. When have you experienced the difference between healing of the body and healing of the soul? And when have the two coincided?

2. Who are the healers in your life? How do they act as healers?

Chapter 24. Sacred Spaces

1. Where is your sacred space, and what is it like? What makes it sacred?

2. Design a sacred space. What are each of its elements, and what effect do these elements have in imparting the experience of the holy?

Chapter 25. The Road to Nadaland

1. What is the difference between being alone and beinlonely?

2. When have you been emptied? What was it like?

3. What is your "desert"—your way to find emptiness so that you can be filled with God?

Chapter 26. Living on Humility Rock

1. When have you been humbled in your attempt to be humble? Have you ever been arrogant about your humility?

2. Have you ever sincerely believed that others will suffer damnation if they don't accept particular religious doctrines? Do you believe that now? Are any of these doctrines problematic for you?

Chapter 27. Another Rule: From Golden to Diamond

1. When have your attempts to practice the Golden Rule backfired?

2. Can you find examples in the gospels where Jesus practiced the "Diamond Rule"? ("Do unto others as they would have you do unto them")

Chapter 28. Another Road to Soulful Sexuality

1. How has faith and religion affected your own sexuality, for good or ill?

2. How has faith and religion affected your view of the sexuality of others, for good or ill?

3. Based on your own positive and negative experience, what "sense education" would you like to share with your children or with others in coming generations?

Chapter 29. The Practice of Beauty

1. When have you found beauty in what the "mass culture" defines as ugly?

2. What makes art or music "Christian"?

3. In what ways have you become the beauty that you see?

Chapter 30. Another Road to Christian Social Activism

1. What is the connection in your own life between spirituality and work for social justice and peace?

2. In faith communities of which you’ve been a part, what have been the most useful efforts for social change?

Chapter 31. Toward A New Covenant of Love

1. Identify the areas of your life in which you live by covenant, and those you live by contract.

2. In your community, do you see examples of people living by covenant?

3. What role should government play in fulfilling the "100 percent covenant" of love among people?

Chapter 32. A Theology of Enough

1. What factors underlie your decisions about giving to charity? How do you decide what to give, and towhom?

2. Does your charitable giving and volunteer service outweigh the destructive impact of your consumption patterns? Or vice versa?

3. What is the most effective charitable organization you know? What makes it so effective and efficient in use of its resources for good ends?

4. If you assumed that everyone in the Third World was watching you all the time—how you spend money, what you eat and wear and buy, every minute—would it change how you act?

5. Which new products and services now becoming available do you think will be beneficial to your relationships with other people, and which do you think will be harmful to those relationships?

Chapter 33. The Road to Vocation

1. Is your profession also your vocation? Is there a tension between the two? If so, what is it like?

2. What role does your vocation have in your community? How does it serve your community?

3. How does love flow through your occupation or vocation? In what new ways can love flow through it?

Chapter 34. Ministry by Many: All Are Called

1. What stories can you tell that illustrate the difference between ministry and other forms of helping relationships?

2. How are the roles of professional clergy changing? How does this affect congregations?

1. Read the Apostles’ Creed (page 277) line by line. Do you agree with each statement? Disagree? If so, what do you find troublesome?

2. Write your own "credo" for Christians. What are its connections with the doctrines of traditionalChristianity, and how does it depart or evolve from them?

FOR LINKS TO OTHER OPEN, PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES: