Christian Conversations

I am interning during this academic year with the Wesley Fellowship at Duke University. They are Duke's United Methodist campus ministry group. I was very active with this ministry during my undergraduate years at Duke, and I also live in the house that they own near campus, so it's a community that is near and dear to my heart.

One of my projects this semester is to facilitate a small group that will discuss "social issues" or "politics" or "something". Though it is an election year, we will hopefully not talk much about the election per se. However, I do hope that over the course of the semester, the students will at least develop an understanding that it is impossible to be an apolitical Christian, because of the political nature of the Christian story. ("Politics" here being understood broadly as "the way we interact with one another in the world.")

I have been very unsure of how to proceed. Should I ask them to read a book during the semester? Should we discuss a different specific social issue each week? I'm not sure. But Will Willimon is back on his blog today with a report on his conference's effort to have productive discussions about the current U.S. wars, and I think it describes part of what my hope is for my group this semester. His post is worth a quick read.