Stephen Crawford (2011), Creative Commons
Bible studies often begin well with a good launching question. When I prepare to lead, I usually prepare the beginning at the end. I like to know where I’m going before I decide which way to kick the thing off.
For those who like examples, I now spread a feast. Here’s a list of sample launching questions I’ve used in the last 6 months with (hopefully) enough context for you to make sense of them. The “Central Truth” was the passage’s main point that I wanted the group to see by the end of the study. The Launching Question was my very first question to begin the study.
Exodus Launching Questions
Context: church small group with a variety of ages and life situations among the members.
Exodus 3:7-4:17
Central Truth: God’s agents must share God’s heart for God’s people, but often they don’t.
Launching Question: How do you normally respond to the weakness or suffering of other people?
Exodus 4:18-31
(I can’t take credit for this one. My co-leader Warren Wright led this study.)
Central Truth: God prepares and provides for His servants so that they may be ready for service.
Launching Question: How does God prepare you for service? Or: How do you prepare for important events/actions?
Exodus 5:1-21
Central Truth: When God’s plan doesn’t match our plan, we usually look for someone to blame.
Launching Question: What would you like to see God do in our Growth Group? (Dream big!) What will you do if the group doesn’t meet your expectations?
Exodus 5:22-7:7
Central Truth: To know Yahweh as your God, you must experience deliverance and the fulfillment of his promises by the hand of his mediator.
Launching Question: What do you think it means to know God? How does one go about knowing God?
Exodus 11:1-12:28
Central Truth: All must know that Yahweh owns everything and remakes his creation at will.
Launching Question: What does it mean to “redeem” something? In ordinary usage? In the Bible? [I wanted to get at the idea of ownership.]
Exodus 12:29-13:16
Central Truth: Future generations must know that Yahweh owns the firstborn (=everything) and remakes his creation at will.
Launching Question: What is the most important thing you would like to be remembered for in the future?
John Launching Questions
Context: ministry small group with summer interns (all undergraduate college students). I felt like I could push the boundaries of social awkwardness just a little to make John’s points clear.
John 1:1-18
Central Truth: The eternal God entered human history to reveal himself so we might become his children, but our natural response is to reject him.
Launching Question: Let’s test the quality of your sex education: How is a baby born?
John 3
Central Truth: We must know two things to see and enter the Kingdom of God: 1) The Bad News: our need for rebirth, 2) The Good News: the arrival of a savior.
Launching Question: What happens when a willing couple can’t get pregnant? [Insert discussion of modern fertility treatment procedures and the understandable desire to make new births happen.] Why do you think people won’t accept Jesus’ message today? [Connect to our inability to force a new birth.]
John 19
Central Truth: The King’s work is complete.
Launching Question: Would you like to have a romantic relationship? Why? How else do you respond to your innate sense of incompletion or loneliness?
I invite your opinion. How could these launching questions be improved?
Thanks so much for these examples. I am getting ready to start a Men’s study on 1 Peter and need to come up with such a question. Thanks for the help. I do indeed like examples and this feast is helpful!
Thanks, Peter. These are helpful. I have become more and more convinced recently about how important our questions are, in the small group context as well as in all our relationships.
One of the challenging things for me when thinking about “launching questions” is this: I find that at the very beginning of a study/discussion people are less willing to volunteer answers to deep questions. (As the study goes along and people are more “warmed up,” this reluctance may go away.) So, as I understand it, a good launching question would point the group in the right direction and have some connection to the central truth of the passage. But a question like “What do you think it means to know God?” is a big, heavy (important!) question. Do you remember if that particular question served its purpose? As I envision asking that to my small group, I only hear crickets.
Those are good questions, Ryan. I can’t say for certain that “What do you think it means to know God?” hit the bullseye. I honestly don’t remember. My questions are far from perfect, and I have my share of crickets in attendance (usually at my own invitation, of course).
Every group is different, though I would agree with your general experience that the heavier questions are better later in the study. If we want to dig a hole, we have to dig the shallow dirt before we can dig the deep dirt! Do you think a question like this might work with a clear opening vision (“tonight we hit a critical topic…”) or some prompting follow-up questions (“What does the average person think it means to know God?” Or, “Do you connect more with the idea of a relationship, or with learning about God, or with something else?”)?
I think you have some great ideas here. I’m new to the idea of launching questions, so I haven’t tried them out myself. But your “clear opening” phrasing might just work. If we admit at the front that this is an important topic, and that we know answering this question is unnatural and difficult, that might take away some of the awkwardness.
I think some of the other ideas in your last sentence are good ones too. I think there’s a way to make it safer to answer a deep question (though I might want people to encounter the question more “dangerously” later) — make the question hypothetical or about the “average person” (like you suggested) or even to ask what the common cultural opinion is about a topic.
My small group met tonight, and we actually never got around to the study. But if we had, here’s what I was going to try: we were going to study Isaiah 26. The central truth I think the passage is teaching is that God is the righteous judge, caring for his people and punishing his enemies. The launching question I was going to ask was this: What do you think of when you hear the phrase “God’s judgments”? How does our culture view that phrase?
I thought that last turn on the question gave some distance between the responder and the answer, and that hopefully would make answering an initial question a bit safer. But I never got to try it out tonight!
Thanks for the help thinking through these important topics!