Whatever your perspective, when stuff like this happens – for those seeking to teach the Bible – it puts us in an unenviable position
It can be hard to bounce back when we feel like our story is being misrepresented.
In the public square, or in the classroom, or even in our own meeting places, it can feel like everyone thinks that you carry this unhealthy agenda of indoctrination.
At AccessTheStory we now have some years under our belt of diffusing this tension and cultivating learning practice that provides genuine space for leaders and learners to discover together.
One of the things you can do to help make this shift is RESHAPING YOUR DESIRED LEARNING OUTCOMES – our learning experience VERGE became a rich laboratory for this to happen – where we made the choice to assume that the story of God was being heard for the first time – let me give you a couple of examples of how our learning outcomes shifted:
My expectation through the telling of the creation narrative has usually been to convince people of the existence of an Eternal Creator, whereas as we retold the story afresh, one of the more common learning outcomes has been for learners to simply reconsider their own heritage or starting place.
Another example has been through the narrative of Genesis 3 – a default expectation in the past has been to convince people of their sinfulness, whereas a consistent learning outcome through VERGE has been for people to discover the origin of pain in creation and separation in the experience of humanity.
As we observed these kinds of responses, it helped us reshape our desired outcomes – it seemed like as we gave ourselves permission to hold our agendas loosely, new discoveries and responses to the story of God emerged in ways we never expected.
We’ve pieced a simple learning framework together which gives more examples like the ones I’ve already stated. You can access this framework now by signing up to our storyline tribe.
Our hope is that through this framework, and any other interaction you have with AccessTheStory, you will see your community move beyond the expectation of being indoctrinated, and into the realms of transformation.