may 2013
celloutlines | overview Introduction This month’s Cell material focuses on difficult questions. This is not necessarily an attempt to try and answer these difficult questions, as they are subjects that theologians have spent many years trying to figure out, and therefore it might be pretty tricky to try and come up with an answer in one Cell session! However, it will hopefully give you and your group the opportunity to explore some of the trickier questions that we as Christians ask. It is important that we keep asking questions and that we don’t just take stuff at face value all the time without really thinking about why we believe what we believe. The format of this month’s Cell will involve three weeks in which you explore a different question each week – and then the final session will be slightly different. Week Four is your group’s opportunity to think about questions that bother them. It will be good to ask them in Week One what these questions are, so that you can take some time to plan Week Four. You could do this either by facilitating the session yourself or by inviting the corps officer and/or some people from the church to help share their thoughts and opinions. Make sure that there is enough time for preparation for either yourself or your guests. Also, make sure that the young people realise that either you or the special guests are not necessarily going to give them the answers to all the things that they have asked, but will hopefully be able to give them some useful tips and ideas for exploring these big questions themselves, as well as what their own opinions are and how they reached that point. It will be helpful to have a copy of The Salvation Army Doctrines handy so that you can keep referring to those if needs be. It is hoped that these sessions will provide a good forum for discussion. The idea is that you will be able to unpack some key issues and questions, and that this will help the young people to realise that they don’t necessarily always need to have all of the answers for everything, but that it is important to keep asking questions and unpacking things themselves. An interesting thought to get your group to consider at the start of this series: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.’ (Luke 10:27 NIV)
celloutlines
What do you think is meant by loving the Lord your God ‘with all your mind’?
www.salvationarmy.org.uk/alove