Working name. It's the first thing I'd like you to change.
I want to get four to six people around a table, once or twice a month, and actually talk about God — whether there is one, what he's like if there is, and what any of it asks of us. Not to settle it. Not to represent a side. If that sounds like something you'd want, I need your help deciding what it is.
I wrote a book because I wanted to hand people a different angle on Christ. Somewhere in doing that I realized how far my own thinking had drifted from how most people around me were taught to think about God — usually inside a denomination, usually with the answers handed over before the questions arrived.
What I keep running into is that people mostly defend the club. Different clubs, same sentences. Here's why ours is the right one, here's why it fits best.
And it isn't only a church thing. Some of the most settled people I know arrived there from the other direction — walked away from faith entirely and landed on a position just as finished, defended just as confidently. Certainty is the common denominator, not the conclusion.
I'd rather go exploring with people than defend a position to them.
I don't get to have that conversation much. That's the whole reason for this.
So you know what you'd be walking into: I'm a Christian. Christ is the center of how I read all of this, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise halfway through an evening.
That's my starting place, not the price of admission. I'm genuinely not looking for a room that agrees with me — I've got no interest in hosting a table where everybody nods. If the only people who show up already think what I think, I've just built a smaller club with better manners.
You don't need to hold any particular belief. Christian, agnostic, Muslim, Jewish, ex-something, still working it out, sympathetic to all of it, sympathetic to none of it — all fine, and honestly the more of those at one table the better.
There's one thing I'd ask for, and it isn't a position. It's a posture: willing to put your own assumptions on the table, not just everyone else's.
The only thing that really doesn't work here is someone who's finished. If you already know how the story ends — whichever ending that is — then there's nothing left to explore, and the evening turns into an argument about whether God exists. That's a fine conversation. It's had loudly and often. It isn't this one.
This is my guess, and the whole reason I'm sending a page instead of a text is that it shouldn't stay only my guess. Take any of it apart.
These are real questions, not a survey I already know the answers to. Answer whichever ones you have an opinion about and skip the rest.
My lean: no idea. "Room for Doubt" is a placeholder I wrote in ten seconds.
My lean: twice a month, weeknight evenings. I have four kids, so I'm probably the least flexible person here — tell me what actually works and I'll bend around it.
My lean: as varied as possible, but not lopsided. My one worry is that if almost everyone lands in the same place, we'll spend every session on whether God exists instead of getting anywhere interesting. I'd like at least a couple of people who hold a faith seriously, and at least a couple who don't. Beyond that, the wider the better.
My lean: start private. Later it could become a podcast, or a public conversation that isn't recorded. I don't want to decide that before we know whether the thing is any good — and I'd never record anyone who didn't want to be.
My lean: people who'll disagree with me — and people who aren't already in my orbit, because my list is short. Names, or just a description.
My lean: something, probably. This is the most useful box on the page.
No commitment past showing up once. If the first one's bad, we don't do a second one.
Then paste it into a text to me. Nothing on this page sends anything on its own — I'd rather tell you that than have a button pretend it did something it didn't.
If nobody bites, that's a real answer too, and I'd rather know. But if three or four of you say yes, we've got a table.
— Chris