Holy Conversation by Richard Peace
This is the last one of these I plan to do for now.
Good: Evangelism as two-way conversations on a journey;
Bad: The group material is rather dull.
Holy Conversation by Richard Peace is subtitled "Talking about God in everyday life". The book, organised as twelve sessions for groups, sets out to support its users in doing just that. The first two paragraphs of the first section, The Study Guide At A Glance, are:-
- What's it all about? Learning how to talk about the gospel in natural, informal, conversational ways.
- Why is this important? Personal witness has gotten stereotyped as a confrontational monologue with a stranger when it's really meant to be an ongoing conversation with family, friends and colleagues. We need to relearn how to talk about our faith.
Amen! and Alleluia! to that. You can see the introductions and the full first session of this course by clicking on the picture of the book, courtesy of Google books.
The basic idea behind the book is that everybody is on a spiritual journey, whether that journey is through a religious space or somewhere else, and that as fellow-travellers we can help one another along the way, and learn from one another. The model is not that one person has 'made it' and is giving the other a route-map, but that Christian and non-Christian alike are travelling and each has something to share. One way of sharing is by talking about spiritual matters: 'Holy Conversation'.
Another key idea in this book is that, rather than just having a bunch of churchgoers talking together about such issues, each group-member should try to find a 'conversation partner' - someone outside the group, preferably outside the church, who is willing to be a 'guinea-pig' for the member to practice talking to about spiritual matters. It is important to be up-front and transparent with this conversation-partner; not least because you need them to be open and honest with you about how they experience what you say to them: as a genuine conversation, or as a sales pitch.
The course is organised into twelve sections, but these can be combined if necessary in various ways to fit into the time available.The sessions cover topics such as Jesus, meaning, sin, repentance, faith, etc. There is a lot of printed material for each topic, along with several questions for group discussion. A lot of the material is good, but I'm not sure how interesting it would be in a group context, particularly as the questions seem rather dull to me. Also, some of the key concepts have their secondary meanings emphasised at the expense of their main use in the Bible: 'faith' is defined primarily in terms of things believed, rather than trust; 'repentance' is treated as primarily a change of mind rather than a change of life-direction; he goes around the houses a bit on sin, but never quite gets past the 'sin is being a naughty boy/girl' model. Peace deserves brownie points in all this for making the effort to unpack and move beyond the standard theological jargon though.
The book ends with a summary of key concepts, practical notes for small group leaders, and Peace's original article, from which the book/course was developed. An interesting paragraph from that article presents a challenge for Christians wanting to share their faith in the 21st Century:
This is the challenge for concerned Christians who want to be part of this cultural conversation but who also want to be faithful to what we have come to know and experience in our Christian faith. How do we talk about faith in ways that are honest, accurate and genuine in the midst of a postmodern climate that is suspicious of truth claims, hesitant to make commitments that seem to limit personal freedom, and dismissive of institutions that appear to be self-serving? However, there is another side to postmodern reality. Postmodern people are actively searching for truth that is experiential, for communities in which that truth is lived out and for spiritual experiences that are real. So the challenge is to learn how to converse in ways that touch these longings, are faithful to core Christianity, and are noncoercive.
You are most welcome.