Building Empathy with Good Questions

If you’ve got a group with lots of churched kids—especially if those kids have been in Awana for a while and are achievement-oriented—they’re probably really good at answering “what” questions. They’ve got the facts down. They can deliver the right answers all night long.

But now that they’re in middle school and high school, what we’d love to start to see in them is an increase in empathy and compassion, key components in loving our neighbors. We’re rooting for our students to begin to more openly “feel with” family members and friends—as well as with hurting strangers and even enemies.

We can help them with that by being more intentional about asking simple empathy questions, such as:

“How do you think Mary felt when the angel appeared?”

“If you were one of the disciples, how do you think you would you have felt when Thomas said he wouldn’t believe Jesus was alive without touching His wounds?”

“Jesus asked the disciples to do something that seemed impossible. How do you feel when you know what God wants you to do but it feels impossible?”

“Why does the Bible talk so much about controlling our anger? Why is anger harder to control for some people than for others?”

Those kinds of questions require more thoughtfulness, and not every student will have the same answer. In fact, some of the learning comes from hearing how others answer differently from how I would (without either of us being “wrong”). With the right mix of students, you might even stir up some healthy discussion.

In the end, the goal is to force us to exercise our empathy muscles a little, to become stronger at sharing the feelings of others so we can better reflect Christ-like love to them.