Questioning answers

I've been pondering, and discussing with people, the idea that perhaps post-modernity offers us the opportunity to return to a form of learning that instilled wisdom through the quality of the questions we were asked, rather than the answers we were given.

Last week I sat with a young man for four hours and tried to explain the concept of teaching through offering questions rather than through delivering answers. He kept looking beyond the questions I asked, to find the point where I'd tell him the right answer. In the end my questions had caused him to think, which had led him to some self-deduced conclusions. He left with a head full of questions, and perhaps a disturbed sense of equilibrium. 

Later that same week, I had an hour with another young man. He too is training to be a leader in the 21st century Church. We were debriefing our past 6 months together and were discussing my style of teaching. Despite numerous places where asking questions had encouraged him to own a personal position on the topic, he hadn't planned to use the same techniques to teach those who he would be teaching this semester. 

Ironically, the under 30's intuitively feel the imposition of being force-fed answers from their tutors, but they still relapse into expecting that the depositing of answers into open minds is the only valid way to teach. 

I've long been convinced that we in Christendom need to ask compelling questions that can stop young people in their tracks and create a need to think through a personal response to those compelling questions. I also think if we can create engaging platforms through events and venues where those young people can come together and discover a "Crowd Sourced" response to these compelling questions then we'll have many more young people interacting with our churches and Christian campus organizations. 

Last week also included my own equilibrium being disturbed by discovering inconsistencies in my own thinking that were highlighted by a revolutionary idea I heard from a pastor in Tennessee who regularly asks his congregation to text him their questions. 

I walked around the idea for a day or two, then decided that I'm going to implement this great idea in our college ministry starting this week. Despite my own personal revolution in post-modernity I was still thinking it was up to us teachers to come up with the compelling questions! So I'll be sending out via email, Twitter, Facebook and pigeon carrier a desire for compelling questions from those I would teach. 

I'm really interested in what this will produce! I had an entire semester's worth of weekly questions/topics prepared that I had "decided" we needed ready for when our group reaches the critical mass of 25 committed students that we need to launch a weekly large group event. 

I had the speakers lined up, the "compelling" questions preordered and then I found myself walking right into the wall that my new friend from Tennessee created by simply mentioning that he routinely asks his audience to frame the questions they want to ponder together! 

Modernity was with us for a prolonged period and for most of us "adults" who led and teach this next generation it is still a challenge to shrug of old ways of developing wisdom in to next generation to make room for the new ones. 

What do you think? Is it time we began questioning answers?