Getting to the Point 2: Writing the Study

This transcript has been automatically generated

Session 2. Everyone should have a handout. And we’re doing all right for time. That’s good.

OK, so we’ve understood the passage. We’ve nailed that. We’ve got a point and an aim. It’s brilliant. And what we want to do now is think about how to teach it, how to write it.

So the most important thing, as ever, in teaching the point and aim, we want to make sure we get to the point. We want to get to the point, make it clear, and make it simple. Now I want to talk about just 2 dangers when we’re writing a study that people often fall into, that I often fall into, and that’s the danger of the Oscar winner and the election winner. The actress and the politician. Now, have you heard an Oscar winner?

Their speeches, they go on for quite a while, there’s lots and lots of information in there, they cover all the bases, but if you’ve actually listened to one in full, you kind of, you’ve forgotten half of the actual thank-yous they said by the time they get to the end.

And if you are an Oscar winner’s Bible study, that means that just in the same way, you basically cover every little bit of detail, You thank all of the boom boys, you mention every verse and little baby idea in the passage, but actually the result is that your main point, your main idea is lost because you’ve covered every single idea. That’s the problem with an Oscar winner’s Bible study.

And actually the reason why we often come up with those Bible studies is because We just, we like to put all the detail in. It’s quite easy, we’ve noticed something clever, we want to whack it in there, and we want to show off how clever we are to our groups, so we don’t want to take anything out. But the problem is that we have more detail but at the cost of clarity on the main points. That’s the problem with the Oscar Winners Bible Study, and there’s just too much too much in there. On the other hand, there’s also the danger of the election winner, the politician, and nobody likes politicians.

And that’s because their great skill is saying lots without really saying anything at all. You know, kind of, if you heard them kind of answering a question but not really answering it, and they weren’t— they’re not really prepared to speak about anything that isn’t on their agenda, they haven’t been told to say by their kind of, you know, PR guru, whoever it is. And when we have election winner Bible studies, it means that we just go for the bits we like. We just go for the bits that are on our agenda. There’s a little verse there which you don’t really understand, and there’s a verse over there about hell that you don’t really want to talk about.

It’s a bit awkward. But there’s a really nice verse about how love is great, so we’re going to talk about that. And we’re just going to focus on those favourite bits, those favourite verses and best ideas.

And I guess the reason sometimes we write them is because it still sounds quite clever, we’re kind of wrestling with the text, we’re going to probably spend a big chunk of time on some of those verses.

But just like a McDonald’s meal, it might be immediately kind of satisfying and impressive, but soon after you’re just left with a nauseating kind of Just pain.

Because the problem is that it’s an easy way of looking clever when you haven’t really understood the passage. You haven’t actually done the hard yards on getting to your point and aim. So you notice one bit in the passage which might sound like a good thing to say or an impressive thing to say, and you run with that, but you haven’t actually gone through the real point and aim. Of the passage. So don’t write a study like an Oscar winner, don’t write a study like an election winner.

And the key to getting this right is working on balance between detail and big picture. If you see that on your handout there, there’s a bit of a scale. So on the one hand, we obviously need all the detail. The detail is ultimately where everything comes from. And we want to be able to understand all of that.

But there’s also a bit of a payoff with that in the big picture, because we want the detail to be there so that we can get the big picture right. But we don’t want to focus so much on the big picture that we haven’t actually grasped the details. Sometimes we can think, oh, the main point of this passage is obvious, but actually it doesn’t cover all of the details, so maybe kind of Love lasts might be something like that. We think that, oh yeah, love lasts, that sounds like a good main point, but actually there’s lots in the passage which isn’t about love lasting. So we want to kind of get the balance right on the scale.

But big picture is the most important thing probably when it comes to being clear on the point, because the big picture hopefully will be what the point is. So if you want to get your pen and on that scale I think you want to draw a marker Not right in the middle, but just erring towards the big picture, kind of 3/4 of the way down, if that makes sense. We want to get the balance right. We don’t want to be in either extreme, but we want to be using the detail to make sure we are focusing on the big picture, rather than only on the big picture. Okay, brilliant.

So let’s get that right. So once we’re there, we can start writing a study that gets the points. Now you’ve got 2 little studies on your handout there, one on the left, one on the right. The one on the left is the kind of study that we don’t want to write. That’s the kind of study where we go through each verse and ask one question about each one, one idea at a time, and then you get to the end.

And you don’t really know what’s going on, you kind of, you’ve with every verse and you kind of get there, but it doesn’t actually ever get to the point. So on the right-hand side, just a little example about how a study that gets to the point might look like. So let’s just work through it from top to bottom. The opener. The opener kind of, it might be something which you don’t think about that much, and it’s always useful usually to have an opening question, but the problem is that sometimes you don’t use them very well.

Sometimes we just use them for kind of summing up where we’ve got to so far in the book. Sometimes we just use them to ask how our holidays have been. And neither of those things actually really usually get to the point. You want to be actually, even just from the very beginning, using a question that flags up the main point and aim of the passage. So do use an opening question, but don’t just waste it.

And don’t just get people just chatting for the sake of it, but try and get people already thinking about the main point and aim of the passage.

And then we want to get to the content. But we don’t just want to have questions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. We want to have our main point will probably be divided into 2 or 3 smaller points. And we’ll have one big question for each of them, probably a couple of little sub-questions. Subpoints, little follow-up questions maybe after that.

But you see the difference between the left and right there. We have just a couple of big questions rather than just loads and loads of them.

Most studies you can probably do with 3 to 5 questions. That’s not a rule, but if you’ve got 17, it’s probably not very helpful.

Then once you’ve done all that work on the content, you want to get back focused really clearly on the point and aim. And hopefully at that point it won’t be that much hard work. I don’t know if you’ve been involved in Bible studies when you’ve dealt with a passage and your leader says, okay, now let’s come up with a purpose statement or point and aim, and everyone kind of just looks a bit blankly. Hopefully the way you’ve been going through your content, the way you’ve been sculpting your questions, will make it quite clear what the point is, what the point and aim is. That’s why you You don’t just go through each verse.

So you should be able to come up with a point, hopefully fairly easily. And either way, it’s really important to do that after the content, before the application. Come up with your point and aim. Sometimes people skip that out. They don’t get to the point.

And even when they have done the hard work in really crafting their questions well, then they just go up to application. And even then, you still have the danger of of application being slightly all over the place and not actually coming through the aim of the author, the aim of the passage.

So if we have the point flagged up from the beginning, if all of our questions are focused on getting to the point, if we can establish the point and aim with our groups, then that will really help application. And just to help us with each stage of that now, Sarah’s going to give us some tips.

Okay, so we’re just going to work through each of those stages. So what does it mean? What does it say? What does it mean? And what does it mean for us?

And let’s start with the sort of what does it say. So these are your sort of observation questions. They’re the sort of questions that get the passage, get the group looking at the passage, and so doing exactly what you’ve done in your prep, sort of observing what it says, really thinking about it. And it’s really important to start with these. I think sometimes we can think these are a bit dull, these sorts of questions, and we want to get them to the sort of what does it mean questions because they’re much more exciting.

But you can’t have a good discussion about what it means until you’ve understood what it actually says. So you’ve got to start off there. But it is worth saying that you want to make these questions sort of interesting, imaginative, so they don’t just sort of become an English comprehension exercise. The sort of thing that you can encourage your group to start off in their prep, and the more they’ve done before they come to the study, the more helpful that will be because you can get to the sort of exciting bit of the study much quicker. And there are just 4 principles there that are worth bearing in mind as you sort of write your questions, as you write your what does it say questions.

So first of all, you want your what does it say questions to be open questions. That means that they’ve got more than one answer, that they will sort of get a discussion going, and it’s not just sort of a group member trying to guess the answer in your head. But them sort of looking at the passage together and sort of pulling out lots of the detail. You can use tables, those sorts of things to sort of collate information. But one thing to be aware of, an open question is not a vague question.

A vague question is where people don’t really know what they’re supposed to be thinking about or what they’re answering. You want a question with lots of answers but that is really clear. And that’s the second principle, You want a question that is clear and simple. So a question that’s short, that you ask it and the group sort of can take it in. So just one sentence is enough.

Sometimes you’ll need to give them a bit of information first and sort of say, okay, in these verses we see sort of Jesus focusing on his disciples. That’s just a statement, and then ask the question. You know, sort of a question that says, Who’s Jesus with in these verses? Isn’t really going to get you anywhere. So you want it sort of clear and simple, everyone should be able to understand it, and a co-leader can really help you with that.

As a co-leader looks over your study beforehand, if they don’t understand what a question is saying, then it’s probably not a clear and simple question.

And third principle, that they get people to look at the passage. So, if a question can be asked without anyone even looking at the passage, that’s not a great question. We don’t want them just sort of sharing stuff out of their sack of knowledge. We want them to have to sort of look at what the passage says and go, oh right, I hadn’t seen that before. And then fourthly, this is the contribute to the point.

Is it a question that really sort of gets you sort of focusing on the point of the passage, or is it just something that was quite interesting as you were prepping? And when you write your questions, you know, sort of write them all down and then just go through them and sort of say, is this contributing to the point or is this an unnecessary sort of side question? And if it’s unnecessary, sort of cull it, cut it out. So those are the sort of principles for for what does it say questions. And then secondly, what does it mean questions.

Now it’s easy to sort of think you’ve understood what the sort of passage is saying, right, we’re ready to apply. But Tommy’s already shown us that before you get on to application, you really need to sort of pull everything together and ask, what does it mean?

These are the questions that I think are really exciting. It’s where people are sort of really engaging. They’re working out what the point of the passage really is. Why have we been given all of this information about love in 1 Corinthians 13? And the sorts of questions that you want to be asking are sort of, why does it say this?

Why is it at this point in the argument, in the letter or the book? Why is he saying it in this sort of way? How does it sort of relate to what came before and what came after? And then sort of if you’ve got sort of 3 or 4 sections and you’ve split it up into sections, how do all of those sections sort of fit together to sort of make the point? How does each sort of little section contribute to that big point?

And then the third type of question, the what does it mean for us, the application questions.

In a study, we haven’t sort of understood a passage if we haven’t thought about what it means for us, for us as a group. And it’s important to think about these questions carefully, to think about the individuals in your group and how it affects sort of each of them, how it affects you as the leader. And Tommy’s going to do a bit more about that in a minute, but we’ve got a little exercise for you before that. And the exercise is on the other side of the sheet. These are 2 studies that I found on the internet.

And we’ll split this room in half. So if you’re on my left, have a look at the first study, Study A. If you’re on my right, have a look at Study B. I want you to think about the things that we’ve talked about. So the detail versus big picture. The shape of the study, and then the sort of types of questions, and see how well you think Study A, if you’re looking at Study A, or Study B does on each of those things.

So in your pairs, just a couple of minutes to look at that, and then we’ll feed back.

Okay, let’s draw back together.

Okay, Study A, this half of the room, what did you make of Study A?

Give us some of your observations.

Yeah, yeah, so yeah, lots of sort of references to other bits of the Bible. What did you think of that? Um, I guess if you’re trying to encourage people to get into the text itself, that’s not very good. If you’re trying to do a thematic study, then that might be good, but given this is meant to be a study on 10, 20, 30, probably not helpful. Yeah, just cross those out and maybe, maybe start with a question to talk a little bit more about the structure and how you’re going to break that down.

Yeah, Tom.

Yeah, on the same point, Dav? Okay, yeah, I think that’s really helpful that especially in Mark groups, students having never really studied the Bible in depth before, they’ll be wanting to go to sort of, you know, well, it says this in Matthew or in Luke, And you certainly as the leader want to be getting them to look at the passage you’re studying, and so you’ve got to be really sort of careful and think, do I really need to cross-reference? And think about it 3 times before you do it. Dav, go on. Really long convoluted questions, so a question for its answers, how long it is, and it’s not really— by the time you’ve gone through a Yeah, so I don’t know how you’d even do this in a group study, question 4.

Do you read it all out and then they’ve forgotten what you started with? Or I guess the best option would be having the 3, A, B, and C, written down or something. But yeah, it’s really long and convoluted. And I think even more importantly, as Daz says, where does it get you? Help you understand the passage any better.

Other things?

Let’s go Lucy. In question 3, he basically tells you the point in a question and then you spend the rest of the time working out mundane, not mundane, like subsidiary points. Yeah, I think it’s quite a detailed question, that one, isn’t it? Rather than a sort of a big picture sort of thing. Let’s just go to this group here.

So, Ed? Lots of the questions like question 1 and question 5 are really closed, like there’s only one answer. And question 1’s pretty leading.

Yes, we should be surprised. It’s really surprising. Yep, yep. Donald? I was saying question 2 is quite a good question.

Yeah. Um, it would be great if you could give people a chance to work out sections themselves, but there might not be enough time. Um, so a good question. Yeah, a good question. You could perhaps do it in a slight more sort of exciting way.

Maybe a bit dull, but yeah, I think question 2 is a fair question. Go on, um, Sam. I left the application bit in just to show that that’s what they thought was application, but it’s not application at all, is it? What about— I don’t think anyone’s picked up what I think is the biggest problem with this study. Anyone else got— Americans.

There’s no justification. Go on, what do you mean by that? So there’s no, why does Paul want us to know this? Yeah. Or like, what— how does it fit?

Yeah. It’s difficult language. Yeah.

Yep.

Say that louder so they can hear it at the back. Yeah. A lot of accumulating knowledge with no real purpose to it. Yeah, so if you look back at the sort of shape of the study diagram, how’s it doing on the sort of shape of the study? It’s just lots of sort of information about different bits of the passage, but no sort of flow through it, no sort of pulling it together, no sort of looking at what’s the big point.

So the bit there, the point, what does it mean? It just doesn’t even attempt to do that, does it? So you might come out of this study having understood a few of the ideas or verses a bit better, but have you understood the passage better? I think that’s the sort of really big problem with it. I think, so this was one of several studies that I looked at on the internet, and I would say that that was the overriding problem.

With most of them, that they just didn’t really sort of ask the what does it mean question at all. So lots of the studies were quite good on some of the sort of observation stuff, but the what does it mean, they did really poorly in general. Okay, Study B, what did you guys make of Study B? Jane? Right.

Go on then.

So, is it fair to say there are no observation questions? Other people?

I think if I got to, um, if I got to kind of questions 3, 4, 5, I’d be thinking I’m being asked the main point, but I haven’t actually looked at any individual verses, and yet you’re asking me to do that. And even in the first question, it’s asking me for an opinion. I haven’t done anything before that to have an opinion about it. Questions like that, questions 3, 4, and 5, they kind of are a little bit observation-like, and you may be maybe could like break down into some little groups and discuss each of those and then come back and bring it together. But it— but that you’d need some sub-points or something because I can see a scenario where that won’t close it.

It’s a fair thing. We’ve got a sub-study, you might rock up knowing people have hopefully prepared reasonably well and say what you think they have to— you think that— you think that— but you’ve got, yeah, students who’ve never studied the Bible formally like this before. You’ve got to lead them to find the point for this section. You can’t just throw a big question like that at them. Natalie?

I just found it really intimidating. There was— I mean, like you said, like, what’s the main point? You can do that at the end of, um, the more worldwide questions. But it’s something with opening answers and things like that, whereas when it’s really specific and where the answer series are quite long, you need So it expects quite a lot of the group, doesn’t it? That’s definitely true, and sort of goes straight in.

Sarah?

Are trying to head in a good direction. They just worded it really badly. Yeah. Changed around a bit, softened a bit, um, a few sub-questions, it could be really good. Yeah.

It’s just more what Andy was saying, more what he would do personally to prepare for his law, as opposed to what we could do for it. Yeah. Mike. Um, so 7, 8, and 9 is kind of the kind of application questions Um, so 9 is pretty— 9 is quite vague, so there’s no direction of how the, the passage really— so like the author’s point in the passage should affect how you’re challenged. So it’s encouraging you to kind of pick out a verse and say, how does that challenge me?

But on a more positive, I thought 7 and 8 are quite interesting in that it’s— it looks like it’s almost encouraging Sorry, it looks like it’s trying to see what a wrong application would be, but he doesn’t really then follow up with a question and say, well, actually, why isn’t that what the author intends it to be? And I think they’re definitely the sort of questions that will engage discussion, aren’t they? I was a bit confused about why you’d ask question 8, but— I thought they were a good question. Okay, and it was— does anyone know why that was a question that would have been asked? Tommy knew this.

Yeah, so this was Tony Blair read, um, 1 Corinthians 13 at Princess Diana’s funeral. So I think that was— so those questions could work, but then if you haven’t got to them, if you haven’t actually worked out what the main point is, yeah, the answers will be really different. So depending on what the question is like, the first question is like, yeah, you’ve got to that point, you could have really like off-the-wall answers. Yeah. Same for the other application questions.

So it does assume that the whole group understand this point before you get to that, Charlie. We thought actually they’d be quite good at the beginning. Yeah. And so they would get them wrong happily. Yeah.

Especially seeing as it’s almost kind of linked to question 2, like where he’s trying to talk about context. He’s saying, you know, he made the statement it’s not a standalone poem about love. How does it tie in? Yeah. Sam, do you still have a Point?

No, it wasn’t you. Someone at the back then had their hand up. Okay, Marcus. Like questions 1 to 6, you can almost just say, like, just cut out whichever passage you’re doing and just whack in whatever it is there. It seemed really kind of standardised.

Yeah. And it means that basically as the leader you don’t need to do that much prep, but your group have to do loads.

Yeah. So, so maybe I’ll come clean on this in a moment. So just say, I think the thing that this second study does much better than any others that I’d found is the sort of shape of the study. It is all focusing you on what’s the main point, what’s it mean, and then sort of application. And so it does that much better than the first study, and hopefully you see that.

To be fair to this second study, it was actually, I don’t think it was written to be a study that you lead in a group, it was actually preparation questions for people coming to a group study. It’s actually off the St Helen’s website, so— but it’s good to see that, you know, so yeah, don’t just pick something off a website and think that’ll do. You can do better. Thank you for your hard work.

Brilliant. And it is slightly ironic, isn’t it, in a passage— in this particular passage, we had lots of questions which are kind of, like we said, all about accumulating knowledge about the passage and not really doing anything with it. I think you might have worked out that’s not a good idea to do. But it is a hard passage to apply, isn’t it? We’re going to think about application now.

We’ve already mentioned one world leader getting it wrong, Tony Blair reading it at Diana’s funeral. Does anyone know another world leader who’s misquoted this passage in the last few years? Steph, Chang Ji, no? There you go. You have his badge, I think, on your— Barack Obama.

Barack Obama, his inauguration speech. What did he say? I can’t remember what he said. I’ve completely forgotten the verse now. Yeah, sorry, that was a most special moment, but This passage is not about Obama going from being a boy to becoming a man.

But there you go. And yeah, this is how we always mention weddings, didn’t we? Nobody here had this at their wedding, did they? We went to a wedding. Good, okay, that’s alright, that’s alright.

Because it’s just cheap, isn’t it? I mean, I had William Taylor speak at my wedding on hell, and that was kind of awkward enough. But I mean, this is basically like having someone stand up at your wedding and say, today’s passage is saying you don’t love one another. I mean, that’s not really what you want. That’s not really the sentiment you want at your wedding.

So it is a hard passage to understand how to apply. And we’ve said so far, we want to get the point and aim of a passage right so that we can work out the genuine application. But even then, we all know, don’t we, even once we’ve got— we might have a stellar aim But it’s hard to get that, to really drill that down into application. So we’re going to think about that now, what it really means for us. How do we actually make application work?

And just to say quickly that as we discussed yesterday, this is why regurgitating SLOB studies, particularly in application, is really unhelpful, just a waste of time. SLOB studies will be questions applied to you. And your RML studies or IGG studies will be applied to your students. The aim will be the author’s intention, and the application will be what it means for us as individuals.

And there’s a couple of things which are helpful in getting it really right. We already talked about the first one, which is just applying it to ourselves and praying about it. Again, it sounds obvious, but actually we often don’t do that, we often skip over that. And if we’re really thinking about it for ourselves, praying in the truths, then actually it will be a lot easier to think about what it means for others.

And secondly, just think about it. I’m not saying that we don’t think about it, but often we don’t do. We kind of, we have our aim sentence and we kind of think, our application question will be, how does this apply? What does this mean in practice for us? Things like that, which is just kind of, again, it’s quite lazy, and I’ve probably written questions like that, and we’ve probably all seen that.

But we need to think hard about what the genuine applications will be. We don’t just want an application for this to be, you know, what is love, how are we in love, but kind of what is this gonna mean for us in practice. And I guess thirdly, in terms of for us with our groups, if we’re gonna be able to do that well, Just a separate thing is we’re going to need to get to know them really well. We’re going to want to be sharing our lives with them, understand what’s going on in their lives. If they have something going on, a family issue back home, if they’re struggling in their studies, if they’re just not kind of feeling very well, we need to know about that.

And we need to be able to know things like that if we’re going to be able to really apply God’s Word to them. And just a little tool which you may have heard before, to help us with application is just thinking about head, heart, and hands. Does that make sense? So first of all, we need to think about our heads, our thinking. So let’s just take 1 Corinthians 13.

I guess the main thing that needs to change with our thinking in this passage is that love is actually better, it’s more important than knowledge, and it lasts forever. And actually, how is that going to change our thoughts? Well, you might get the really kind of brash young student who thinks that RML is all about turning up each week and showing off just how clever he is and putting down the other people in his group who aren’t quite there. But actually, we should be loving one another. Our SLOV study should look like loving one another and not just about accumulating knowledge.

How is that going to change our heart? Well, I guess we’re generally going to have to think about how much do we love others more than ourselves? And are we kind of really generally doing that? Do we want to serve brothers and sisters? Or do we just want to be the top dog?

And those are the most important stages, I guess. Heart, head and heart, before we get to hands. We need to have those processes done before we kind of leap into the hands. So if you just straight out told people, right, you’ve got to you’ve got to love people, you’ve got to serve people, shut up if you’re being an idiot, then they won’t really have actually changed inside. Once, if you actually, if your head and your heart really know why love is better and really want to love, then actually the hands will be a lot easier and will stop us from just being legalistic about it.

So, zalaqat application is hard work, but we can do it, we can pray about it and think about it. And we can think about it in terms of the whole person.

We’re not going to have a go at this exercise because I fancy a coffee, to be honest. And so we’re going to have a break now and we’ll meet back together in 10 minutes or so.