Before the Session
Facilitator: In advance of the session
- Have the Bible Background Video ready to view.
- Review today’s scripture text and the session activities to help better facilitate the discussion.
- Encourage your group to listen to the Faithelement podcast ahead of the next session (Share the link via email or social media)
Context (From the Media Session Page)
Play the Well Done movie clip and ask:
- How does it feel to make a presentation to an important group and why?
- How impressed does the doctoral council seem to be with Stephen Hawking and how do you think that made Hawking feel?
- Why might he seem confident he can prove with a simple equation something impossible to prove?
- Even though we may disagree with his conclusions and perspective about Jesus, how empowered and confident does he seem after being told ‘Well Done, Doctor’?
- What does that tell you about the power of faith in you?
Content (From the Mind Session Page)
Read Hebrews 11:1-16, then watch the Bible Background Video.
Then ask questions like these:
- What do you think of the writer’s definition of faith in verse 1 and why?
- In what ways does faith in God change the way we see the world according to this passage?
- In what ways do each of the characters in this passage exhibit this kind of active faith?
Read aloud James 2:14-26 and continue with:
- Why do you think faith and action are so intricately tied up together?
- Why do you think the writer of Hebrews says it requires faith to please God?
- What does faith allow us to see, or what does it allow us to look beyond?
- The old saying says, “seeing is believing.” If seeing is not the root of faith, how might we revise that saying?
- In what ways does this kind of faith make us “strangers and foreigners on the earth?”
Closure (from the Current Session page)
Share this quote from Wendell Berry:
Good work finds the way between pride and despair.
It graces with health. It heals with grace.
It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.
By it, we lose loneliness:
we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,
and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments. – Wendell Berry, What Are People For
- In what way is story-telling a way we “clasp the hands” as this poem suggests?
- Whose hands clasped yours in the “dance” of faith in a way that moved you or strengthened you?
- What kinds of stories would you like to have told about you and the way your faith has influenced others?
- What stories about works of faith need to be told in your faith community and why??
If time allows, listen together to “The Tale You Told”
before closing with a prayer that includes this passage from the song:
I was afraid to hope
Until I read the words you wrote
And I hung on every quote
Living there
(in the tale you told)
And now love cast its spell
In the tale you tell
How I can fly
Up to a holy place
Dancing a dance of grace
Close in prayer.