The Ministry of What

So, I'm talking to another pastor and she's talking about a CPE class she's in the middle of and how she had asked someone WHY they felt the way they did about something. Her mentor said that she shouldn't ask WHY, because it ends with the head (it'a all about THINKING) and instead should have asked WHAT questions (which, apparently, is all about the heart - or FEELING). So, not "Why do you feel this way?" But, rather, "What makes you feel this way."

So, she did it and it worked. The person really opened up. The conversation, she says, went clear back to the childhood and some kind of conflict with a parent...

I'm not entirely convinced. I think that ANY carefully chosen questions can lead a person to undersanding themselves a little more - who, what, where, why, when, how... It's not so much the words as the intent...

You see, in framing her "WHAT" questions, she really had to think about what she was going to say and what she was looking for...

Okay, so what?

Dunno, maybe I'm just really tired today...

Check in later...

Comments

Michael Airgood said…
Bill,
I don't know if it was an accident or a malicious plot - but, someone has changed your coffee to decaf. You need to go get regular coffee and start blogging again. Please.
11:03 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Buzzword Bingo

Image
Everybody has buzzwords - business has theirs, the entertainment industry has a lingo, in sports, and in church work we have ours, too. Dilbert the other day had the pointy haired boss try to lead via catchprhases: copyright Scott Adams I have threatened to make up "Buzzword Bingo" cards for Annual Conference. You know, put words like "Holy Conferencing" and "Inclusiveness" and "Core Value" and, oh yeah, "Jesus" on the card and when you get five in a row you can jump up and yell "BINGO", or maybe "Holy Spirit" I don't know... We're not allowed to play bingo, so we definitely shouldn't yell out that word. Maybe if I had people yell out "Hallelujah!" when they got 5 in a row, the powers that be at conference would just assume that the person was powerfully moved by the point being made.* But we would know - and would secretly give them a prize.** The point being that we like to use the t
Read more

B C Comic

Image
So ten years ago Johnny Hart (who died like 4 years ago) ran this strip (click to enlarge): And there's been controversy since.  Okay, I get it.  Hart was a Christian and he expressed his faith in his comic strip - lots of people calling him a fundamentalist...dunno what his particular Christian religious persuasion was - except that his funeral was in a Presbyterian church. So, anyway, it's just clear that lots of people missed the point****.  In fact, Hart himself claimed to be shocked that people thought he was an advocate for  replacement theology  based on the strip...  He could be clever - a 2006 strip that I think has a well played double entendre: (And, for the record, I'm no more or less offended by that than I am by people who use  Fred Phelps  as the posterboy for Christianity - every religion has it's crazy fundamentalists...well, the big ones I know about, anyway...)  Nice double joke on "moon shaped" and bug - Luna-Tic[k] and, of course
Read more