Donald Miller

A Couple years ago I interviewed about twenty-five friends and asked them each five questions.

1. What did you think of God/Christians before you became a Christian?

2. When did you realize there was a dark or hard side to life?

3. When did you realize there was a dark or hard side to yourself?

4. What did it look like when God broke into your world?

5. What does your life look like now?

I wasn’t sure exactly what we’d get when I did the interviews. I had a film crew in from South Africa, but only a week before they arrived, all our film options vanished. When they got to Portland, I had nothing for them to shoot. We sat around in my breakfast nook trying to figure out what we were going to do. And we came up with the interview idea. After that, we put together a little book that takes a similar journey, just processing the idea of Jesus from an outsiders perspective. The book is called “The Open Table” and so is the DVD. They are available separately, but I hope they end up being used to hand to folks who have questions about faith and specifically Christianity.

The project evolved into this non-threatening way to talk about God, by giving them a book that just has five weeks of daily readings that more or less answer a questions about God (ie. Does God like us, Is God judgmental, Does God get angry, Is God causing all the problems in the world, and so on).

Here is a clip from the first section of the DVD, answering the question “What did you think of God/Christians before you became a Christian?”

I talk more about the project at www.jointheopentable.com