244 Chapter 7 different, and you can also move with that in the sense that you can listen to someone else. I wrote that down, that it is also important that you know yourself and know why you stand for something, why you believe something. In the latter response, by a member of the outsider group, the mentioned pedagogical notions of delaying and connecting are tied to personhood formation, the growing of a self and of a Christian faith or life conviction. Openness in matters that really matter and bother the person is only possible when knowing what one’s own position on the topic is—and religion is the type of topic that, to the person who takes it seriously, really matters and bothers. The members of the conversational community agreed on two things, as formulated by two different participants: ‘It is also important to know yourself and to know why you stand for something, why you believe something’ and ‘That doesn’t take away from, I think, that you may still be in the middle of a search yourself’. To the last asseveration, the member that expressed the first responded: Yes, I don’t mean that you have to be completely sure of everything yourself. It’s okay to search. But that you have some kind of ground somewhere or something. Or that you at least think about it. At least, that you’re not immediately blown away when someone claims something you’ve never heard before or something like that. From this point on, the minutes and transcripts show a consensus within the conversational community that searching and continuing the development of one’s deepest convictions are part of an attitude that is Christian in and of itself. Analysis of the coding process reveals how the participants started to tie this ongoing truth-searching process to values that were consistently related to Christian theology. Values such as respect, humbleness, non-judging and reliance on God started to increasingly co-occur with absolute truth itself, as the following statements depict: • Respect – absolute truth (6 co-occurrences in meetings 11–14). Example: P1: If you are listening to the other’s perspective just in a way like, oh, but I don’t agree with that, how can I react to that… P2: Yeah, you almost feel like, I know much better how it is. P1: Yes, but then you don’t listen to the other person anymore. • Humbleness – absolute truth (four co-occurrences). Example: Well, indeed, the objective truth, on the one hand, and the subjective truth of people, on the other, is always something of an interpretation. We also said, yes, there are also fragments of truth in other religions that you can sometimes learn from, and that they perhaps see certain things more sharply in the conversation. And we
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