18:28-38)
UNUSUAL QUESTIONS
LEADER GUIDE
PART ONE: AN OVERVIEW OF UNUSUAL GOSPEL FOR UNUSUAL PEOPLE
INTRODUCTION TO THE BIBLE STUDY SERIES
Welcome to the leader guide for Unusual Gospel for Unusual People. In these pages you will find nearly everything you need to facilitate a one- to three-month study of the Gospel According to John. I say nearly
because the one thing I can’t supply in this guide is your willingness and dedication to be a Bible study leader. Such willingness and dedication spring from your acceptance of God’s call to guide others deeper into their lives as followers of Jesus Christ. I thank God for your leadership, and I promise to provide for your weekly preparation. This book includes an overview of the study as a whole, a guide for session planning, advice for organizing and facilitating small groups, and session plans. Each session plan offers myriad resources for bringing your participants into a deeper encounter with Jesus Christ as found in our unusual Gospel. It is to this peculiarity we now turn, but not before I thank you once again for answering God’s call to help others study God’s Word.
AN UNUSUAL GOSPEL
The Gospel According to John rounds out the foursome of accounts of Jesus’ good news that we find in the New Testament, but it probably hasn’t escaped your notice that it’s pretty different from Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It paints the same general picture, yes, but John uses different brushes, different techniques, and different colors than the others. There are no parables in John. There are neither traditional healing stories nor demonic encounters nor transfiguration. The big moment in the upper room is washing the disciples’ feet, not offering them Communion. Flipping over the moneychangers’ tables happens at the beginning, not the end. And Jesus never once keeps his divine identity a secret, as he does in the other three accounts. Let’s face it: John’s account of the Gospel is just plain unusual.
In the three modules of this Bible study, we’ll look at some of the unusual things going on in the fourth Gospel—unusual healings, unusual names, and unusual questions. The peculiarity of John is the only thing tying the modules together, so feel free to pick and choose which you’d like to do depending on the length of your course. It could be four, eight, or twelve weeks long. Feel free, also, to do the modules in any order. Once you choose a module, make sure to do the sessions in order over a four-week period so we ensure the daily digital content transmits correctly. But hold on a moment, Adam, you might say. Why study this unusual account of the Christ’s Gospel in the first place? Well, we should study this unusual Gospel because we are . . .
AN UNUSUAL PEOPLE
It’s probably time for those of us who follow Jesus to realize we are once again the unusual ones in society. Sure, many Americans profess a belief in God and identify as some sort of Christian, but there’s a big difference between checking Christianity
on the census form and living your life as a follower of Jesus. People who strive to follow Jesus every day of their lives are fewer and farther between than at any point in history since the early church was still illegal.
Back before the Roman emperor decided to decriminalize Christianity (and way before a later emperor declared it the empire’s official religion), being a Christian was an unusual (and sometimes dangerous) thing to be. Christians were considered atheists because they didn’t pay tribute to the Roman gods or to divine
emperors. They often refused to serve in the military. They worshiped underground—literally, in some cases. There are plenty of ancient eyewitness accounts that speak of the peculiarity of those followers of that Jesus fellow. For the first couple of centuries of Christianity, being a follower of Jesus Christ was just plain unusual.
Then, like the indie band that signs with a major label, Christianity became the state religion, and it became fashionable in the empire. Over the next several centuries, Christianity spread throughout Europe, becoming the It
religion. No longer unusual, Christian
was just what you were. In some of the more tragic moments in Christian history, it was even compulsory.
Skipping forward to the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the Western world has turned the corner onto
