Tim Yearsley reveals how a decade leading a Navigator student ministry reshaped the way he asks (and answers) life’s biggest questions.

When ‘good questions’ fall flat 

The student in front of me looked as if I’d asked him to explain quantum physics. 

He didn’t even study physics. He’d only stepped outside the library for a smoke break when a stranger (me) stopped him to fill out a survey on students’ beliefs. It started innocently – name, course, year – but within 10 moves arrived at the question, ‘Why should God let you into heaven if you died today?’ 

That student didn’t have a clue. And it wasn’t his fault. It was mine. 

Students generally don’t think about such things. I was forcing a conversation on this student that he hadn’t signed up for, and making him feel guilty for not having the perfect answer to a question he’d never considered. Repeatedly, my ‘surveys’ ended as awkwardly as they’d begun. If I ever felt like I’d won a debate, I could be equally sure I’d lost the person. 

Stop winning arguments, start hearing people 

I changed tack. No more surveys (a relief to the library residents, no doubt). Instead, the team and I started chatting with students in the bar, listening with genuine interest, asking questions out of curiosity. We heard their stories without rushing them to consider their salvation. 

We started hearing about longings and hurts, frustrations and aspirations. Not just which course a student was on, but why they were on it – what had drawn them there, what was hard, what they hoped it would be worth. We heard their anxieties over their relationships, mental-health struggles, coping strategies, and whether anything resembling faith was helping them hold it together. 

Good things happen when I stop talking as if I know all the answers. 

Ask what they’re actually asking 

The team and I decided to spend more time on what Jesus taught about the questions students were wrestling with. And not only what Jesus taught, but what the grand sweep of the biblical story revealed about work, about sex and relationships, about the mind and what it meant to have a healthy one.  

Over several years, a series of in-depth Bible study guides emerged. We tested them with our little student community. Some came to faith. Others seemed to grasp the gospel’s implications for their lives for the first time. I think it was because we were helping students find answers to the questions they were actually asking. 

These Bible studies have now been published by the Navigators and go by the names Work.Life, Sex.Life and Inner.Life. 

A decade later, I don’t think the questions have changed all that much. After all, to be human is to work, to love, and to have a mind. The gospel has always had something to say about such things.  

That said, whatever questions the people around you are carrying, it makes sense to make those questions your starting point. We might find that our friends are more ready to hear the answers than we expected.