Any Quality Church Quizbowl Questions out there?

[pblessman]

Somebody in my church suggested the possibility of running a quizbowl tournament for different church groups to compete in. Now I know there are bible bowl questions or something like that, although I've never seen a match (or set of questions). However, I don't believe there are any "good" sets of questions around which would work for this purpose (i.e. only pyramidal TU questions about topics OT, NT, Christian Theology, and Church History). So... does anybody know of a good source of questions, or is anybody out there interested in writing some questions in this area?

[Nuclear Densometer Test]

You could always check out the ACFDB and narrow it down to religion questions only, then pick out the ones you like.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

After writing RMPFest, I considered trying to write a lot of Bible/Christian theology tossups and marketing them to churches and other groups that played Bible Bowl. But I took a look at some sample Bible Bowl questions, and it seems to mostly be "here is a Bible passage with some blanks, fill in the blanks".

I wonder what the market would be like for ACF-style Bible questions.

[at your pleasure]

Might be worth a try, Bruce. Also, Phil, I suppose you could cull from the RMP-fest set.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

Here's one potential issue I see with trying to market ACF-style bible bowl questions:

I write a lot of questions on concepts from theology. Things like "predestination", "prayer for the dead", "doctrine of the real presence". As an atheist, I write them from a fairly objective point of view (though I do think I have a slight Methodist/Arminian bias, as I think they are the "least wrong" Christian group). This is fine for ACF, where few players are practicing Christians anyway.

But when you're selling to churches, you run into the issue that churches DO have specific and divergent views on these issues. If I write a tossup on predestination, it might be received very poorly indeed at a Baptist church, which might consider the doctrine erroneous and not teach it at all. If they do teach it, they might be miffed at the pro-predestination things cited in the question. And even a Calvinist church might be miffed about ant-predestination things cited in the questions. Even if there's no such offense taken, specific denominations might be put to sleep by tossups on concepts from other denominations. If I write a 20/20 Bible and Christian Theology packet, I can see a Protestant church getting very bored with the 3/3 Catholicism that keeps going dead.

I'd love to get some feedback from people who are more familiar with the Bible Bowl circuit and might know how such questions would be received across a wide range of denominations.

[Cheynem]

That's a good point, Bruce. I've been kicking around writing a Bible set for a while out of both personal (for those who may not be aware, I'm a practicing Christian) and quizbowl reasons. One challenge here is that such a set tends to become two things: either more of a philosophical set which uses theology, interpretation, and commentary type clues or more of a literature set which basically asks you to remember incidents, characters, and quotes.

[Charbroil]

But when you're selling to churches, you run into the issue that churches DO have specific and divergent views on [religious] issues.

In my personal opinion, I don't think this would be a terribly significant issue in this regard, if only because you're fairly limited on how much theology you could toss up at the high school level (presumably the level we're talking about?). In any case, you could always add a disclaimer that some of the topics in a packet are controversial between denominations.

After writing RMPFest, I considered trying to write a lot of Bible/Christian theology tossups and marketing them to churches and other groups that played Bible Bowl. But I took a look at some sample Bible Bowl questions, and it seems to mostly be "here is a Bible passage with some blanks, fill in the blanks".

This, on the other hand, I think is the crux of the problem with trying to write Quiz Bowl questions for Bible Bowl--namely, Bible Bowl seems to be much more interested in people memorizing phrases and words rather than asking about concepts, individuals, and texts. As you can see here, not only are you told the book from which you'll draw all of the questions beforehand, but the questions are written so that every question will be a buzzer race (the notation, such as "for 10 points," does sounds like it comes from Quiz Bowl, though). Thus, it looks like if you want to write mACF Bible Bowl questions, you'd have to create an entire new circuit to play them on.

Therefore, Coach Blessman, are you sure the individual who mentioned this idea to you wanted actual Quiz Bowl style questions (as opposed to Bible Bowl style questions)? If it's actually the latter he/she wants, I doubt anyone on the circuit would be interested in producing them, since the questions as they stand are opposite of every aspect of good Quiz Bowl. But if that person want mACF questions, there might actually be quite a bit of potential in that field, since as far as I can tell, good Quiz Bowl revolving around the Bible and/or Christianity doesn't exist.

[Rococo A Go Go]

This is an intriguing idea. I think it'd be an interesting ecumenical pursuit if people from different denominations collaborated on the set, and maybe even different churches could compete on it as well.

[Kwang the Ninja]

As another practicing Christian, I would be willing to organize/work with others on such a set.

[Jeremy Gibbs-Marangoni Effect]

I'll add to the voices that agree that theology shouldn't comprise a large portion of hypothetical sets marketed to churches. I have quite a bit of experience with Bible-based quiz competitions (not exactly Bible bowl, but some weird Arkansas-centric variant), and I can tell you that mACF questions would be a very tough sell; in fact, probably far tougher than converting Chip-centric high school teams to good quiz bowl. As others in this thread have noted, church-run competitions tend to rely heavily on rote memory, some to the point that questions are given out beforehand to the competitors. That being said, this sounds like an intriguing idea.

[pblessman]

We do NOT have a Bible Bowl circuit here, so that would work to our benefit in the sense that people just aren't aware of what is generally considered Bible Bowl, so if I was able to come up with a "good" quiz bowl set focusing on these areas people wouldn't reject it based on it being different. I don't have the time to cull questions from larger sets or to coordinate a question writing effort, but if somebody else wanted to take the lead on this I would be happy to contribute some questions.

[Cheynem]

Are you in a time crunch for this? I have no time at all for the next month and a half or so, but around March 15th or so, I might have some time to work on it.

[Charbroil]

Also, how many questions are you going to need?

[pblessman]

There is no specific deadline. This was just a suggestion for something which would be a neat thing to organize for our youth group to compete against other churches with no specific date in mind. When there are sets available, I'll get things organized with the group. Realistically, things are going to be difficult to get together by fall, but if we have several people interested in writing questions and maybe also getting some matches or even a tournament going in there area, we could probably pull this together by the fall? In terms of number of questions, we'd have to discuss question distribution etc. Assuming 20/20, here's a first crack at that:

4/4 Old Testament
4/4 New Testament- Gospels/Acts
4/4 New Testament- Rest
3/3 Church History
2/2 Theology
1/1 The Bible in Art
1/1 Hymns and Classical Christian Music
1/1 "TRASH": Christian Bestsellers, Contemporary Christian Music, Current Events (biggest church in Korea; Promisekeepers; etc.)

[Kouign Amann]

I'm not sure if I like giving the Epistles the same amount of space the Old Testament. Maybe 3/3 rest of NT and add the 1/1 to theology?

[Kwang the Ninja]

I'm not sure if I like giving the Epistles the same amount of space the Old Testament. Maybe 3/3 rest of NT and add the 1/1 to theology?

NT-Rest would also include Revelation, and you can really get at least a tossup a round from the stuff in there. But you're right, probably that should be cut (I think) to 2/2 and add 1/1 to Art and Theology.

[pblessman]

OK... looks like we have a pretty good idea on distribution... maybe something like this:

5/5 Old Testament
4/4 New Testament- Gospels/Acts
2/2 New Testament- Rest
3/3 Church History
2/2 Theology
1.5/1.5 The Bible in Art
1.5/1.5 Hymns and Classical Christian Music
1/1 "TRASH": Christian Bestsellers, Contemporary Christian Music, Current Events (biggest church in Korea; Promisekeepers; etc.)

I moved one NT-other TU and bonus down to the Arts, and one up to the OT... anyway, seems this wasn't leading to substantial objections otherwise. Now we only need a volunteer to spearhead the question writing process... but I don't want to do it, of course.

[Charbroil]

I might be interested in this; when would you need to finish this by?

[pblessman]

I'll leave the deadline setting up to the person in charge... are you volunteering?

[Cheynem]

After the national collegiate tournaments, I should have time to write a few packets for this.

[Charbroil]

I'll leave the deadline setting up to the person in charge... are you volunteering?

Yeah, I forgot to respond to this--my apologies. I should be free starting around mid-May, if you don't mind my volunteering.

Also, if anyone wants to sign up to glance at these questions after editing (since my knowledge of theology, as opposed to religious works, is somewhat fragmentary), that would be great.

[Geringer]

I would like to contribute to this. I wont have time to contribute a ton, but I do have pretty decent knowledge on the subjects. If you're including any Catholicism stuff, I can at least edit those questions.

[Rountree]

Coach Blessman,

Are you still looking for some questions? I have a handful that I would be willing to contribute. You can email me at the address to the right.