Join us this Thursday night, July 9th for a double feature event at the Soul Garage:
6pm: We will continue the conversation we started a couple weeks ago about race, justice and current events in our country related to those issues. This time, it will be more of an actual conversation, now that the groundwork has been laid. If you weren’t able to join us and you want a recap or if you need a refresher, see the review below.
7pm: Movie Night @ the Soul Garage! We’ll be watching Inside Out and eat popcorn.
This event is geared primarily for youth from incoming 6th graders through 2020 grads. Parents and adults of all ages are encouraged to join us for the conversation element at 6pm, but the movie night is only for youth and leaders/adults who have completed our background screening process.
Youth are welcome to come to both the conversation and movie or just one or the other if they prefer.
Review of Conversation Part 1
A couple weeks ago, we started a conversation about current events that have caused a lot of disagreement in our culture. During that conversation, we laid the foundation for having disagreements:
- It’s good to argue (if by argue you mean to present ideas and reasons for those ideas). We don’t want to live in a world that silences opposing ideas! Instead, we want to thoughtfully engage in discussions and arguments that wrestle with opposing ideas. For more information about this, check out Gregory Koukl’s book Tactics.
- Sometimes we react to something that we decide is not right by swinging to the opposite extreme. Unfortunately, the opposite extreme is probably not the right response either. Usually the right course is somewhere in the middle. This idea is represented in the Hegelian Dialectic.
- How do we know truth? As Christians, the Bible is our ultimate authority. Everything else is interpreted and understood through the lens of Scripture. The Wesleyan Quadrilateral (see image below) helps us to see that while tradition, reason and experience all have their place, they should submit to Scripture’s authority, not the other way around.
- Last summer, we took a team to the UK to visit our missionaries in Birmingham. While there, we used guidelines from The Feast organization to learn how to talk about our faith with people who have different faith beliefs. Those guidelines are applicable to all conversations about opposing ideas. See the image below for the guidelines.
- Sometimes when we are disagreeing or arguing about ideas, we have fruitless discussions because we are arguing at the wrong level. In the blog post How to Disagree Better about Covid-19, Conspiracy Theories, and Pretty Much Everything Else in Life, author Natasha Crain explains the Thought Pyramid (see image below). Argument often takes place at the application level, however, disagreement often actually takes place at the fact or interpretation level. Arguments are more productive when we argue at the lowest level of disagreement.
- As an introduction into the specific issue of Critical Race Theory, we played the first video in a series called “The Great Awokening” by Krista Bontrager and Monique Duson. These two ladies host “All the Things Show” where they discuss issues of theology and culture from a historically biblical perspective.
THE SOUL GARAGE 