This week I spoke to our minister about teaching Bible classes again. It’s been a while and it appears to be needed. Last time we came on too strong and burned out all our teachers. This go around, it will be different.
In any case, I have been talking to new members in my church and I asked them what they need. It seems that although theologically suspect, I received 8 weeks of post-baptism training that isn’t being done. One person I spoke to said that they were excited at first, but now feels like they are unable to fight certain things and don’t really understand how.
I volunteered to write a proposal for a new “Deep Convictions” class that I hoped would be more interactive and hopefully less theologically suspect. I’ll post more as it goes along, but the proposal thus far looks like this:
Each week, every member of the class listens to a recorded 15 - 20 minute lesson. Then they work through various written assignment during the week. These are all designed to be really small. A few minutes a day, not an hour or so. The actual class session will be sharing, directed discussion, and encouragement. The goal is self-discovery, so the exercises during the week will be about asking the simple questions as well as ‘practice’ for techniques mentioned in the recorded lesson.
Week One: Assurance - Am I Really Saved or Will God Change His Mind?
Week Two: Six Places to Focus as You Start
Week Three: Personal Worship - Singing and Praying
Week Four: Personal Worship - Reading Your Bible
Week Five: Family - Love One Another
Week Six: Maturity - Dealing with Personal Sin
Week Seven: What Are My Gifts?
Week Eight*: Caring for the Community
Week Nine: Sharing Jesus with the World
*Week Eight can be moved to coincide with our church’s week to work the Francis Siena House.
Anywho, feel free to offer lessons or help or share your thoughts. The more the merrier, right?
Comments
8 Responses to “Onward and Upward”
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- toeteaknow: well, since it was a post, the answer I guess is ‘yes’ and not ‘maybe’….. …maybe not? ttk
- pinakidion: what rock said
- Rock: “Is Pinakidion ever going to post again?”
- salguod: Is that an answer to a question that I missed?
- xray342: How’s this for cryptic? $ echo ‘pinakidion’ | md5 16da6556b9ba8a411a6f4251591eae2b
Hey Bear, I like the titles. I’m sure you’ll do well putting these together. Not that I’m trying to change the order, but I know for me the wondering about God changing his mind didn’t come till much later.
Looks good over all. What is your teaching on assurance going to look like. The way you phrase it seems to indicate that God did the choosing and for some reason would unchoose. I know you’ll be teaching that God does not “unchoose”, but will you be teaching that He chooses?
Also I want to take this class Week Four: Personal Worship - Reading Your Bible.
Not being a TULIP person, I think you know what the answer will be. I’m one of those Semi-Arminians that uses the term “double predestination” in that I do not believe that God chose us before all time and that we cannot resist his choice anymore that I believe that if a person is not chosen they cannot be saved no matter what.
However, God does choose us and arrange so many things in our lives, even arranging where we live so that we can reach out to Him even though he is not far from us. Acts 17:25-27
The thrust of this week is primarily going to be grace. The title, though, comes from Romans 8:32-34
Would a Calvinist be welcome in your fellowship? Why or why not?
Hey Bobber, keep in mind that your question is a change of subject.
As far as the acceptance of Calvinist, most of us consider Calvinism vs Arminianism a disputable matter. If a Calvinist (or Deist or Pentecostal) came and openly decried that we were somehow in danger of Hell, they would not enjoy our church very long. Not because they would be forced out, but our theology is so different.
Our minister received theological training from a Reformed Theology School and he accepts Calvinists easily enough, but doesn’t accept the theological system of it. He gets a great deal of help from his Reformed professors in many matters.
Will any of your stuff be available online?
Ok, sorry for the change, I was just curious.
As I came to reformed convictions, one of the elders at my old church tried to convince me it was wrong. This was one of several reasons that led me to look elsewhere for a church family. I would never tell a group of people they were in danger of hell because they were Arminians. However, I think it’s interesting for C of Cers to consider if a Calvinist would be welcome in your fellowship.
One thing I consider strange is that Barton Stone (in his early career) was anti-trinitarian yet he was welcomed into fellowship by Campbell aparently. Even today, the word trinity is shuned as far as I can tell by most C of Cs. The doctrine of God would appear to me to be a much weighter matter than Arminian vs. Reformed.
Sorry for getting so off topic. Hope it’s at least interesting.
Blessings,
Off topic is TOTALLY GREAT. Just making a note of it. In some ways, I’ve gotten used to assuming a defensive posture, so I did not mean to offend at all. If I did, I apologize.
In another note, yes, I hope to make it available online, complete with audio files. My version will have me doing the audio, the church version will have a variety of folks.
Stone was anti-trinitarian, I believe that it is why a few branches from the CoC are that way. My experience with the CoC (not ICoC) has been that they are non-trinitarian in practice and not doctrine. They will preach about the Holy Spirit and the deity of Christ, but attribute almost nothing to the Spirit.
My understanding of the Restoration Movement at its beginnings was to be more inclusive, the search for restoring the first century church was the unifying agent.
The ICoC was and still is about emotional experience. As such, the Spirit and the works of Satan can be overemphasized. So much was stressed about fighting Satan, that little attention was given to the power of God and how He has already won.