The Power of Questions: How to Challenge Assumptions in Preaching
What’s the image that comes to mind when I ask you to think of an emperor a hundred years ago, stepping outside his castle doors and down the staircase to greet his subjects?
What do you picture the emperor wearing?
You may be seeing a long, red brocade cape with white and black ermine lining; a gold, bejeweled crown perfectly balanced on his head; and a scepter to match in his hand.
Because that’s what an empreror wore, right?
That would be a fair assumption because (I assume) many emperors did.
But it wasn’t a fair assumption if you were Hans Christian Andersen’s emperor who was duped by some clever conmen and his vanity.
The emperor was led to believe that the cloth the weavers created would be invisible to anyone who was unfit for the job he held, or “very simple in character.”
When the emperor could not see the cloth on the loom, he could not believe himself to be unfit or “simple.” Because he must be fit and wise, he acted as though he could see it. Of course he could!
Once the ensemble was “finished,” the emperor proudly donned it, and his courtiers—who also believed themselves both fit and wise for the jobs they occupied—pretended they could see the clothes as well, holding up the ends of the long robe as the emperor began the procession.
You might think that when the party’s folly was exposed by a child, that would have been the end of it.
But it wasn’t.
The emperor, who still could not believe himself capable of being duped, carried on with the procession in naught but his skivvies, and his courtiers continued to hold aloft the robe that did not exist.
How might it have gone differently if each man who had seen no gold thread on the loom believed it possible they could be fooled and had questioned their own assumptions based on the evidence?
Why We Make Assumptions
Just like the emperor and his entourage, we make assumptions by not looking for or by overlooking the evidence.
We truly can’t help ourselves.
An assumption is the lightning fast explanation we make that connects random bits of information into a believable narrative.
We do this when we don’t have the time or mental bandwidth to figure out the real story so we rely on the story that makes the most sense.
The emperor and his courtiers overlooked the evidence that there was no cloth on the loom because that was more believable than being unfit to see it.
When assumptions are inconsequential, there’s no harm done.
But when we allow our assumptions to morph into “facts,” we get into trouble, like…
“The church could keep its doors open if the pastor recruited more young families.”
“Our church is very welcoming!”
“There’s no such thing as sytemic racism.”
“Jesus said the poor will always be with you, so that’s just the way it is.”
“God is male because God made a male first in God’s image. Therefore, God can only be referred to as He/Him.”
When assumptions block us from the truth — from the gospel — we have a real problem.
If Assumptions Lock Us In, Questions Lets Us Out
What do you need to challenge assumptions? Questions.
What is stopping you from asking questions? Assumptions.
—Milind Harrdas (Ideas on Demand, p. 59.)
How do we know when we’re making assumptions?
By asking one simple question: How do I know?
There are multiple variations on that question, but “how do I know” is the one question to rule them all.
Take any one of the assumptions above and ask how we know not only about the question as a whole, but each part of it.
For example, take “The church could keep its doors open if the pastor recruited more young families.” How do we know that’s true?
How do we know the church could keep its doors open if the pastor recruited more young families?
How do we know the church could keep its doors open if the pastor recruited more young families?
How do we know the church could keep its doors open if the pastor recruited more young families?
How do we know the church could keep its doors open if the pastor recruited more young families?
How do we know the church could keep its doors open if the pastor recruited more young families?
Variations on “how do I know” include:
What is the evidence that this is true?
What authority might we be giving to past events that cloud our vision to believe it couldn’t be different in the future?
How might this belief hold us back from receiving the vision of shalom that God wants for us?
What are five questions that test this theory?
What if the opposite were true? What would be the implications?
How is this belief being used to shore up our egos and protect us from the truth of ourselves?
Take another example: “There’s no such thing as systemic racism,” and ask several of these questions:
What’s the evidence?
How might this belief be holding us back?
What if the opposite were true?
And how might this belief be protecting us from the truth of ourselves that we’d rather not face?
How to Challenge Assumptions in Preaching
We make assumptions all the time—like there isn’t anything new to be discovered in well-worn preaching texts!
We probably make that assumption because we give a lot of authority to the past when we thought we had mined everything there was to mine about a text.
But that’s only true if we return to the same text with the same questions we asked last time.
Ask new questions, find new insights!
Our first task in preaching is to ask ourselves how we “know” what we know about Scripture and theology, about church or societal “truisms.”
The second task is to ask ourselves new questions, wherever they may lead us.
The third task is to raise the “how do we know?” questions for our listeners.
Facing assumptions is hard and dangerous work because it means we’ll be led to own up to our mistakes, to our false perceptions that we’re as “fit or wise” as we believed or want ourselves to be, and to the reality that we probably have to change some things we’d rather not.
When we preach, we must ask the questions that reveal the dichotomy between what we think we know and the evidence.
Exploring these questions allows listeners to discover the truth for themselves, which includes God’s grace and mercy for all the things we’ve gotten wrong.
Facing assumptions transforms us to being fit and wise enough to change.
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