One of the things that pastors should keep in mind when they preach the biblical narrative is to allow the narrative to open us up first. You have to allow the story to start to unfold for people. This use of story is very effective and important for us to understand as we try to connect to the lives of upcoming generations.

You also have to love unwrapping the Scriptures. There is something absolutely scintillating about unlocking the mystery. If you come at the Bible as if it is a document of encyclopedic information, you’ve pretty much killed any kind of life change in a seeker or an unbeliever. But if you come to the Scriptures with surprise and curiosity and a sense of anticipation and wonder, it will translate in the way you communicate it. A lot of the communication process is to keep the surprise there, to teach the Scriptures not as if you’re the person who already knows what it’s all about.

BYO Questions

Years ago, when people would ask us, “Is your church seeker sensitive?” I used to say, “No, we’re insensitive to everyone.” We are not a place for comfort. I mean, Mosaic definitely is an agitating environment where we’re shaking up the core of the human spirit to pull the best out of people.

Instead of trying to make the Scriptures into more palatable, bite-size chunks, we said, “Well, let’s do an all-day on Saturdays, which is a lot to ask, where we will go through one book of the Bible in that day.” And so I began with Romans.

I just basically got up there and said, “Okay, this is a study in Romans. What are your questions?”

And at first they just all looked at me like, “What do you mean?”

I said, “You’re used to someone coming and teaching you what they know about a book. But this Bible study is going to be about what you need to know.”

Before you knew it, people started lining up. And we would spend probably two hours writing down the questions. And now people just come ready to roll. I mean, they come with their questions written out, or on their iPhones, BlackBerries—but the rules are, you can’t ask a question for someone who’s not there and you can’t ask a question that doesn’t actually matter to you. The goal here isn’t to try to stump Erwin—that’s easy. (I would say, “You’re smarter than me, you win”). The goal here is to grapple with questions that are keeping you from living the life God created you to live.

It’s the most exciting time. Someone said to me, “It’s like integrating the movie A Beautiful Life with the movie A Beautiful Mind.” It has both insanity and a mystery to it.

But for me it helps people also to see how I process the Scriptures. It’s unfiltered, it’s raw, it’s unsafe. I make mistakes. And it gives people permission just to ransack and dive into Scriptures and engage it without perfection.

“I Don’t Know”

Remember, the Bible has been trapped in modernity. Everything has to work perfectly. And if everything doesn’t fit in a Lego-oriented functionality, then we don’t deal with it as Christians. We say that these sessions treat the Bible as Play-Doh, just experiencing in the most beautiful and transcendent of ways. We have had interesting discussions. We talked about the potential of time travel in the Scriptures. We go through places—I guarantee you, we address things from the Scriptures that no one else in the world is addressing. And the reason is because we have no rules. And we do not allow anything to stop us from asking everything.

I used to think I had to have the answers for everything, and it was an unbearable burden to carry. And I carried it. I was terrified that someone was going to catch me, they were going to realize I didn’t know, and until one day I found the liberating framework of “I don’t know.” It set me free.

How many pastors have the courage to say, “I don’t know,” all right?

“I don’t know; let me think about this.”

“I don’t know; I’ll get back to you.”

And I can go, “I don’t know; I don’t know if I’ll ever know, but let’s dive into this together.”

If you work with “I don’t know,” it’s a great place to be.