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Lead a Church Study of “Jesus and Lao Tzu: The Way of Love”

Lead a Church Study of “Jesus and Lao Tzu: The Way of Love”

Last updated on: October 12, 2026 at 3:39 am by Gregory T. Smith

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Lead a Church Study of “Jesus and Lao Tzu: The Way of Love” 2026-10-03T19:06:48-08:00 Gregory T. Smith

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Guest writer Jack Thomas (The Irreverent Reverend) reflects on leading his church through a study of Jesus and Lao Tzu: The Way of Love.

I Led My Church in a Group Study of “Jesus and Lao Tzu: The Way of Love”

What if recognizing truth somewhere else doesn’t diminish the truth we have encountered in Jesus? (Image created by Gregory T. Smith on Canva)

Recently, I had the opportunity to lead our Christian church through a study of my friend Gregory T. Smith’s Jesus and Lao Tzu: The Way of Love. Greg and I have been friends for nearly twenty years, so reading the book was personal for me before I ever considered teaching it. I know the person behind the words, and I know something of the thoughtfulness, compassion, curiosity, and spiritual wrestling that Greg brings to questions of faith. That made it especially meaningful to watch members of our congregation wrestle with his ideas.

A Book that Stretches People

I suspected before we started that the book might stretch some people. After all, putting Jesus and Lao Tzu on the same book cover is enough to make some traditional Christians nervous before they ever crack the spine. But the real challenge wasn’t getting Christians to read Lao Tzu. It was helping us resist the deeply Western habit of assuming that if one thing is true, something that sounds different must necessarily be false.

Each Tradition on Its Own Terms

From the beginning, I wanted us to encounter each tradition on its own terms. Taoism did not need to become Christianity to have value, and Christianity did not need to surrender its identity to listen seriously to Taoism. Greg is careful about that distinction himself. He isn’t trying to prove that Lao Tzu somehow predicted Jesus, nor is he trying to baptize Taoism and bring it into the church through the theological back door. He allows the traditions to stand beside one another, sometimes converging beautifully and sometimes remaining distinctly themselves. That became one of the most important lessons of our study: two things can be true at the same time without either one canceling the other.

Dualistic Mindset of Western Christianity

That sounds simple until it collides with the dualistic mindset many of us inherited from traditional Western Christianity. We learned to divide the world into fairly neat categories: saved and lost, believer and unbeliever, sacred and secular, orthodox and heretical, Christian and pagan. Once everything and everybody has been placed into the appropriate theological box, God becomes much easier to manage. We know who is right, who is wrong, who is in, who is out, who needs converting, and who needs saving. The problem is that God has an irritating habit of refusing to stay inside the boxes we build for God.

Leaving Room for Mystery

One of Greg’s greatest strengths as a writer is his willingness to leave room for Mystery, and that became central to the way I taught the book. Throughout our study, I kept returning to Ephesians 3:14–21, particularly Paul’s prayer that his readers might somehow comprehend the breadth, length, height, and depth of the love of Christ. Then Paul makes the remarkable admission that this love “surpasses knowledge.” There is a wonderful paradox hiding in plain sight. Paul is praying that we might know something that surpasses our ability to know. That isn’t dogmatic certainty. That is mysticism.

Christianity, at its deepest level, has always contained this mystical dimension. Faith is not merely agreeing with a collection of theological propositions about God. It is encountering a Mystery that exceeds our ability to describe, define, categorize, or control. Paul concludes his prayer by speaking of God as the One who is able to accomplish “abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.” If God exceeds our imagination, then God certainly exceeds our theology. Perhaps that ought to produce a little humility in those of us who have spent centuries arguing over which group has finally managed to explain the Infinite correctly.

The Names for God

This became particularly challenging when we discussed the names we use for God. Greg places biblical language about God alongside Lao Tzu’s language of the Tao, the “Way,” and asks us to recognize the limitations inherent in every human attempt to name the Infinite. For some members of our congregation, this may have been the most difficult part of the entire study.

Traditional Christianity has taught us certain names so thoroughly that it can become difficult to distinguish between the name we use for God and the Mystery toward which that name points. Father, Lord, Jesus, Holy Spirit—these words carry profound meaning within Christianity, and nothing about exploring Mystery requires us to discard them. The challenge is recognizing that our words point toward God without containing God.

For me, that doesn’t weaken Christianity. It actually makes our language about God more sacred. If God is truly infinite, then every name is necessarily incomplete. If the love of Christ really surpasses knowledge, we cannot simultaneously claim to have completely explained the One whose love we confess surpasses our understanding. Mystery is not the enemy of faith. Sometimes Mystery is what saves faith from becoming arrogant.

People Aren’t Projects

That realization inevitably changes the way we encounter other religions and the people who practice them. One of my favorite chapters in Greg’s book is “Jesus & Lao Tzu on Mission: People Aren’t Projects.” Greg challenges the kind of evangelism in which Christians enter relationships with non-Christians while quietly carrying an ulterior motive. We may call it friendship, but somewhere beneath the surface is the hope that eventually we can get that person to believe what we believe. Greg invites us instead to encounter people as inherently valuable and sacred rather than treating them as religious renovation projects.

Eternal Truth in Another Tradition

Modern evangelical Christianity can become remarkably uncomfortable without certainty and conversion. We want to know exactly what is true, and once we have decided that, we often feel obligated to convince everyone else to understand the truth exactly as we do. But our conversations during this study kept bringing me back to a different question: what if eternal truth can be expressed through another culture, another metaphor, another philosophical tradition, or even another religion and still resonate with the Way of Christ? What if recognizing truth somewhere else doesn’t diminish the truth we have encountered in Jesus?

That does not mean all religions are identical. They aren’t, and pretending they are actually diminishes the richness and integrity of each tradition. Greg’s book works precisely because he doesn’t need Jesus and Lao Tzu to become the same person or Christianity and Taoism to become interchangeable systems. The harder spiritual discipline is allowing each voice to speak without immediately requiring one to submit to the other. We can listen without surrendering our identity. We can learn without becoming afraid. We can even discover that someone outside our religious tradition has seen something about the Mystery that we desperately needed to see.

An Exercise in Theological Humility

Our study therefore became about much more than Taoism. It became an exercise in theological humility. We were learning how to hold our faith with open hands rather than clenched fists. Maybe that is part of what Paul means when he talks about being “rooted and grounded in love.” Roots provide stability, but roots are not walls. Being rooted in Christ does not require fearing every truth growing in somebody else’s garden. In fact, deep roots may be precisely what allows us to reach beyond ourselves without being threatened by what we discover.

A Resource for Pastors

After nearly twenty years of friendship with Greg, I am deeply grateful for his insight, his willingness to wrestle honestly with difficult questions, and his talent in writing Jesus and Lao Tzu: The Way of Love. I am particularly thankful that he has given pastors something we desperately need: a resource that can help us challenge our congregations without simply handing them another collection of predetermined answers. Jesus and Lao Tzu: The Way of Love creates space for Christians to wrestle with questions about language, certainty, other religions, the nature of God, and ultimately the limitations of our own understanding. It gives pastors a tool for helping people expand their understanding of the Mystery of God rather than merely reinforcing what they already believe.

Less Certainty and More Wonder

Perhaps Christianity could use a little less certainty and a little more wonder, a little less defending God and a little more experiencing God, a little less fear of questions and a little more willingness to sit quietly before the Mystery. Greg’s book helped create that kind of space in our congregation, and for that I am grateful both as a pastor and as his friend.

If the love of Christ truly surpasses knowledge, then sooner or later our theology ought to carry us to the edge of what we can explain and leave us standing there without an answer. Maybe that isn’t where faith fails. Maybe that is the place where our certainty finally becomes humility, our doctrine becomes wonder, and our knowledge gives way to Mystery.

And maybe that is where faith finally begins.

Gregory T. Smith’s Jesus and Lao Tzu: The Way of Love is available now on Amazon. Click here to learn more, and to order from your Amazon marketplace, worldwide.
Download the free group study guide for your church group or book club.
Read more from Jack Tomas, The Irreverent Reverend, on Substack.

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About Gregory T. Smith

I live in the beautiful Fraser Valley of British Columbia and work in northern Washington State as a behavioral health specialist with people experiencing homelessness and those who are overly involved in the criminal justice system. Before that, I spent over a quarter-century as lead pastor of several Virginia churches. My newspaper column, “Spirit and Truth,” ran in Virginia newspapers for fifteen years. I am one of fourteen contributing authors of the Patheos/Quoir Publishing book “Sitting in the Shade of Another Tree: What We Learn by Listening to Other Faiths.” I hold a degree in Religious Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University and also studied at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. My wife Christina and I have seven children between us, and we are still collecting grandchildren. You can read more about the author here.

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