The “I Have Some Questions” series begins this Sunday! This will be a bit of a departure from our normal practice of digging through books of the Bible, so I thought I’d give you the quick rundown on how this series has been pieced together.
First, I spent some time praying about the idea and direction of this series. I knew that some people would prefer the ability to submit questions anonymously, so in addition to our weekly “response card” that is handed out in the service, I set up a web page where questions could be submitted without names or email addresses. Over the course of several weeks, we received well over 200 questions on cards and on the website. Most came in online. Nearly all were anonymous. Some questions were very general, some were very specific. Some questions were theological in nature, and some were obviously very personal.
A couple of weeks ago, I printed all the questions out on cards and spread them out on a big table in our conference room. As best as possible, I grouped the questions into categories. (I landed on seven of them… One category being “questions that don’t fit into the other six categories.”) After grouping them, I spent some time thinking through and praying through them. I did my best to distill each category down to it’s own central question, which became the individual message titles for the series.
Once I had the questions formulated, It was time to start gathering resources. Books, articles, podcasts, lectures… Anything that could help shed light on these very difficult answers to some very personal questions.
The ultimate goal is NOT to discover what Steve says about these questions… Not to discover what individual authors say, or even what the church says. The objective in this series is to go back to the Word of God to discover what HE says about them. HE is the truth, and He is all we need.