I was guest blogger for the Off The Map eBay Atheist blog April 25-27. I posted this piece of writing as one of my blog entries. If you follow the link you can read how people responded to it.
I’ve been in a number of small group Bible studies. I used to like them a lot. Essentially what we did was talk about Bible passages and share prayer requestions. But since what we were actually trying to do was change our lives through studying the Bible, they were neat places to get to know each other and work on life goals along side each other.
It’s an awesome experience to be in a group where you feel comfortable enough to share that you have having problems in a close relationship, say, and then the next week people ask you “So how did it go with that person this week? Any change? Any progress?” And they’re asking because they care, not because they’re judging you. Being in a Bible study group can be wonderfully supportive.
In fact it was so important to me that when I was told I could not return to one group because of my mental illness, I immediately contacted another group to see if they’d have me. (They said “sure – no problem”) When I was ill I needed support more than ever – I knew that even if the Bible study leader who asked me not to return didn’t.
It wasn’t mental illness but something else which led to me eventually quitting Bible study groups. It was that I started to have different thoughts about the Bible. Thoughts which meant that if I answered the Bible study questions honestly, my answers would fall outside the ‘range of acceptable answers’.
It’s one thing to be a person who answers outside the range and is quite willing to have the rest of the group ‘domesticate’ them into the range. This sometimes applies to people new to the group (for what it’s worth, it could also apply to someone who has temporarily weird answers because he/she is somewhat mentally ill)
It’s quite another thing to inwardly delight in having found emancipation from the range and to have no interest in being ‘domesticated’ back into it. I knew without asking it that this was not something it would be beneficial to share in the type of groups I was in.
Because of my diagnosis, I was nervous about isolating myself from whatever support I got from Bible study groups. So I continued in them for a while, being careful to stay in the ‘range of acceptable answers’ publically, but being real about life goals I still had very much in common with other group members. There were many of these – the wives and mothers all wanted to be better at those roles, for example.
I suspect that many other types of groups have a ‘range of acceptable answers’ mentality also, to which people must conform or face group disapproval perhaps even to the extent of being asked to leave. In fact, in any relationship we’re in, the other person may have a ‘range’.
- Have you run into this ‘range of acceptable answers’ mentality in the groups (or relationships) you’ve been in?
- Have you been in any groups (or relationships) where you knew nothing you could say was outside the ‘range of acceptable answers’?