The Middle Eastern Roots of Our Faith
The Bible was not written in the suburbs.
It comes to us from a world of tents and terraced hills, of harvest festivals and shepherd kings, of a sky that meant something and a calendar that told a story. This series is an invitation to step back into that world and read Scripture where it was born.
We will move quickly — starting just before Abraham and travelling all the way to the fire and wind of Pentecost — pausing along the way to look at the geography, the customs, the cosmology, the feasts and calendars, and even a little of the Hebrew behind the words we know so well. Expect maps and video, good books cracked open on the table, honest conversation, and prayer.
So if you are someone who has always found the Old Testament fascinating but faintly mysterious, or if you have wondered how the two halves of the Bible actually fit together, or if you would simply like to be more interesting at parties — there is something here for you.
Above all, expect to see the thread that holds it together: a God who binds himself to people by covenant, generation after generation, because what he wants more than anything is a family.
7:00 – 8:30 pm · «ADDRESS — tell me what to put here»
Then the first and third Tuesday of the month, for eighteen sessions.
Everything we are going to cover is already on this site, all eighteen nights of it, written out in advance. That is deliberate, and it is not so you will have homework. It is so that the time we actually spend together does not have to be me talking.
To one is given through the Spirit a word of wisdom, to another a word of knowledge, to another faith, to another gifts of healing… all these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills.
I would rather find out what God has been saying to all of us than tell you what I have been reading. Some of what this group most needs to hear, I do not have. Somebody else in the room does.
That is not an invitation to wander. Paul lists those gifts and then spends two more chapters regulating them, because the same Spirit who gives them is not the author of confusion. Each week has a subject, and the subject is a genuine guard rail. We should not expect God to derail what we have gathered to cover — he illuminates the thing in front of us rather than pulling us off it.
There is a week before we start. You do not need to do anything with it. But if you would like to, here are three small things, and any one of them is plenty.
Three verses, and one page. The whole series is the working out of what God says there.
Ask God what he wants this group to see in it. Not what he wants you alone to see — what he has for all of us. Then leave room for an answer during the week, in the car, in the middle of something else.
Reply to the text or the email. A sentence is enough and it does not have to be polished. Anchor it to what we are covering that week; that is the field we are working, and it is where he has promised to meet us.
And if the week gets away from you and you arrive with nothing, come anyway. That is not a failure, and nobody is checking.
We open by hearing what the week turned up — from whoever has something, not from me. That comes first, before any teaching, because things put at the end of a meeting tend not to happen.
Then a place on the map, a Hebrew word on a card, and a short stretch where I fill in the ground underneath. Then we open actual Bibles and argue with a passage. Then we ask what the Spirit of Christ makes of it here, in us, and we pray what we have just read.