How to use them
Chapters 1 to 3 will surface real prejudice
This is the thing to prepare for, and it is not hypothetical. Asking a room to
name the people they have quietly written off produces honest, uncomfortable
answers, and how you handle the first one decides whether you get any more.
Two failures are available, and both are easy.
The first is shutting it down — correcting somebody the moment they say something
ugly. The room learns immediately that honesty is punished here, and you spend
the remaining seven chapters with a polite group that tells you nothing.
The second is letting it run. Do not allow the room to debate whether a group
deserves to be on somebody’s list. That is a different conversation, it will take
the whole session, and it teaches the opposite of the chapter.
The path between them: receive the answer, thank the person, and turn it back to
the exercise. That is exactly the kind of name this asks for. Now write what you
actually know of their story. The chapter’s own second question does the
correcting, and it does it without anybody being told off.
And say the confidentiality rule out loud in chapter 1, before anyone writes:
what somebody admits in this room does not leave it. Then keep it yourself,
including in illustrations and prayer requests afterwards.
Go first, on everything
The pattern of the whole class. Your list, your assumption, your pipeline
sentence, your reflex, your churchy jargon, your preference defended as a
conviction.
Chapter 4 in particular fails without it: a leader who arrives with five
confident answers about a neighbour has turned the exercise into a performance,
and the room will produce confident answers too — which is precisely the habit
the chapter exists to break. Bring one where you could barely answer question
four, and say so.
Keep the student prompts neutral
The workbook deliberately does not tell the reader what their answers mean. It
asks who is on their list, how much of the story they know, which reflex is
theirs — and stops.
Hold that line while facilitating. The diagnosis belongs to the participant, and
a facilitator who supplies it converts a discovery into an accusation. Almost
every exercise in this book is built so that the finding arrives in the reader’s
own handwriting; your job is to protect the silence long enough for that to
happen.
Two long silences to protect
Chapter 4’s five questions need a genuine fifteen minutes, in the room, not as
homework. Nothing else in the book moves a room as far, and none of that survives
the drive home — the silence is the mechanism, and it only exists here.
Chapter 5’s rehearsal needs five repetitions out loud, in pairs. It will feel
excessive. Skipping it is exactly why the sentence fails in a real conversation.
The last chapter is a brake, not a removal
Nine chapters ask the room to lay things down, and a group that has enjoyed that
will keep going. Say why chapter 10 is in the book at all: everything before it
hands somebody a reason to remove things, and only this one says where that
stops.
Teach it as such. Every obstacle removed except the offense of the cross itself
— and be precise about where that offense actually is, because a preference
defended as faithfulness is the error the chapter names.
Collect the commitments, then ask
Every chapter ends with a name, and several end with a date: the person to ask
about their church experience, the person to go to on their terms, the one thing
being laid down.
Take them out loud, write them down yourself, and ask about them next time. The
asking is what makes the next round honest.
Using the two books
The workbook is the participant’s: a short lead-in, the questions, and the
space to write. Print it front-and-back for a binder.
The leader book is that plus the whole teaching and the facilitator layer —
per-chapter timing, what to prepare, and what to watch for. Keep it open in front
of you during the session. It carries answers and notes that are not in the
participant book, so hand out the workbook, never this.
