The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning

Week 12: Review & Reflection — Living as a Ragamuffin

No new reading this week. Review your notes, journal entries, and any passages you marked throughout The Ragamuffin Gospel.

This final week is an invitation to look back across the whole journey — to name what has changed, what has stayed stubbornly the same, and what you intend to carry forward.

Discussion Questions

8 questions

1.Which chapter or image from The Ragamuffin Gospel had the most impact on you? Was it Jacob's victorious limp, Peter's second call, the ten lepers, the prodigal's father running down the road — or something else entirely? What made it land so powerfully?

2.At the beginning of this study, you likely had a picture of how God feels about you. Has that picture changed? If so, how — and what shifted it? If it hasn't changed, what has resisted the change?

3.Manning's entire project rests on the claim that honesty — not achievement, not performance — is the doorway into grace. Has this study made you more honest with God? With yourself? With others in your group? In what ways?

4.The book is saturated with the conviction that grace is not just a starting point but a lifelong dwelling place. Where are you still tempted to leave the house of grace and go back to earning, performing, or hiding? What does that temptation usually look like for you?

5.Manning's own story — including his alcoholism, his failures, and his long journey toward receiving what he preached — is woven throughout the book. How has his vulnerability affected your willingness to be honest about your own brokenness? Is there a failure or wound you are still reluctant to bring into the light of grace?

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Closing Prayer

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Father, we have walked through this book together, and we are not the same — or we are trying not to be. We have heard again that we are ragamuffins, and we have heard again that You love ragamuffins with a fury and a tenderness that we cannot fully comprehend. Forgive us for the ways we have still resisted that love, still hidden, still tried to earn what You freely give. Thank You for Brennan Manning's honesty — and for using his limp to help us see our own. Send us out from this study not as people who have arrived, but as people who are finally, haltingly, gratefully beginning to believe. In the name of the One who ate with sinners and died for ragamuffins. Amen.

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