Fear of the Other Leader Guide
No Fear in Love
Published August 2017
There is a distinctively Christian way to engage the so-called “outsider” and “stranger.”
This five-week DVD/video based small group study companion to the book, Fear of the Other: No Fear in Love invites readers to consider the Gospel command to love (and not merely tolerate) those considered to be “Other” or outside mainstream Christian culture. This Leader Guide and the DVD (9781501857249), sold seperately, are required for the small group study.
Rooted in the faith of Israel and the Christian story and vision, Willimon – in an onscreen conversation with Delia Catalina Ramirez, brings a non-technical, Wesleyan perspective to bear on what may be the hardest thing for people of faith to do: keeping and loving the Other as Other.
Emphasizing the biblical mandate to receive Others in their particularity and difference as gifts and mysteries bearing the grace of God, this study also offers a strong critique of the privileged who all too often rush to language of reconciliation and evade the huge inequalities surrounding conversations and practices dealing with xenophobia and injustice.
Rooted in the New Testament understanding of Gentile outsiders grafted into the covenant community, this study invites readers to an on-the ground faith that hearkens to a soliciting and revealing God – the God who comes to us again and again through so-called outsiders, strangers, immigrants, and those without status.
The 5 video conversations between Will Willimon and Delia Ramirez focus on each of the five chapters of Fear of the Other:
Session 1: Saved by the Other
Session 2: The Other, My Enemy
Session 3: Learning to Fear Like Christians
Session 4: Loving the Other in Church
Session 5: Jesus, the Other
About the Authors
William H. Willimon
Will Willimon is a preacher and teacher of preachers. He is a United Methodist bishop (retired) and serves as Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry and Director of the Doctor of Ministry program at Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina. For twenty years he was Dean of the Chapel at Duke University. A 1996 Baylor University study named him among the Twelve Most Effective Preachers in the English speaking world. The Pew Research Center found that Will was one of the most widely read authors among Protestant clergy in 2005. His quarterly Pulpit Resource is used by thousands of pastors throughout North America, Canada, and Australia. In 2021 he gave the prestigious Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale Divinity School. Those lectures became the book, Preachers Dare: Speaking for God which is the inspiration for his ninetieth book, Listeners Dare: Hearing God in the Sermon.