The Truth Project

I'm in a small group from church that's going through this video series from Focus on the Family. In order to be a group leader, you have to either go through the series yourself, or else attend a regional training seminar. Our church did the latter. We sent one of our elders to the training seminar last year. He came back very enthused for the program and led the first group at our church, which included our pastor. Now people from that first group are leading three new groups. I'm in the group led by my pastor, and we had our first meeting last night.

The format is two hours long, with meet-n-munchies at first. Then we watch a 50 minute video segment, then discuss, then watch a short postlude video and a teaser for next week's video. Each of the thirteen videos hits a different element of the Christian worldview. The first three are "What is truth?" and "What is man?" and "What is God?" The later videos discuss art, politics, church structure, and more.

The video itself is mostly a lecture given by Dan Tackett, who put together the series based on material he was teaching at some seminary. He got Focus on the Family to bankroll the video production. Anyway, Tackett's lecture is delivered in a room that looks like a seminar hall at college, with about twenty college age kids as an interactive audience. Tackett appears to know them all by name. The lecture is intercut with video illustrations (a little kid jumping off a diving board into his mother's arms to illustrate trust, for instance) and "man on the street" interviews to show how our culture addresses different questions. Also there are talking head interviews with Ravi Zacharias, RC Sproul, and Os Guiness, who provide "expert commentary" on those issues.

The first video was pretty good. Tackett points out how often the Bible justaposes "truth" and "lies" with Jesus on the side of truth, as he says in John 18:37 among other places. The only thing that seemed a little off was when Tackett engaged in speculation about the conversation between God and the angels and Satan about the creation of the world. But I liked how Tackett pointed out that the very first thing Satan does in Genesis is tell a lie.

Also, Tackett is preaching to the choir when he spends an hour telling a group of Christians at a small group that Jesus is the truth, or that truth exists. It would have been good to spend some time discussing how to respond to pagans who question the existence of absolute truth. Tim Keller does that part well in the first part of "The Reason For God."