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Alister McGrath writes, How does humanity find God and enter into a relationship with him — a relationship that delivers humanity once and for all from fear of death, hell, or damnation? Luther is adamant: this relationship is made possible through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and is appropriated through faith.  For Luther, faith is fundamentally an attitude of trust in God that enables the believer to receive and benefit from the promises of God. (Christianity’s Dangerous Idea,…

One of the most significant shifts during the reformation beginning in the sixteenth century centered upon how individuals related to God.  The church had become an intermediary between the people and the Divine.  Luther and others called this system into radical question.  If individuals can relate directly to God, what role does the institution of the church play in the life of followers of Jesus? We will continue our reflection on the evolution of church with focus on the reformation in…

Alister McGrath writes, For Luther, the great question of life was simple and profound: how could he find a gracious God? As a younger man, terrified of hell and convinced of his own sinfulness, Luther gave an answer that was widespread in German theological circles, as it was in popular Christian culture: if he wanted to get in with God, he had to make himself into a good person. … By developing his doctrine of justification by faith, however, Luther…

Adam Nicholson writes, By the early 17th century, a crucial difference had developed in translation theory between sacred and non-sacred texts.  Anyone thinking of translating history, poetry, foreign tales or works of classical rhetoric, taking their cue from Cicero and a couple of words of Horace, would despise the literalist as a plodding, and scarcely civilized pedant.  Any well-educated man would take a text in a foreign tongue and absorb its meaning so that he could reproduce something like it…

We transition this week from the monastic communities of the early church to the reformation of the sixteenth century.  Martin Luther was himself a German monk, thus the way of life we explored yesterday in worship would have been formative to Luther.  Luther lived in a time of dramatic change within the church and the world.  With the invention of the printing press, people began reading the Bible in their own languages. Churches steeped in elaborate rituals & art come under scrutiny. Many…

Have you ever examined the way you pray?  When do you pray?  Do you sit? Do you stand?  Are you at the end of a long day, looking back in your mind’s eye as you drift off to sleep?  Do you pray in the midst of people?  Are you alone?  Are your eyes open?  Do you pray silently?  Do you voice your prayer? Consider these questions.  And then consider this:  When you pray, you are one of millions of other…

Have Christians always practiced prayer? “From the beginning two things have been the necessary form and mystery of Christian spirituality.  Two things, even before the closing events of resurrection, ascension, and commission, wove disparate and often renegade believers into an inspirited body of the whole, connected to God and each other.  Like a double helix rendered elegant by complexity and splendid by authority, the amalgam of gospel and shared meal and the discipline of fixed hour prayer were and have…

Our worship series, Evolution of Church, continues this coming Sunday with emphasis on the monastic communities that formed in the deserts in the first centuries of our Christian tradition. As Christianity emerged as the official religion of the Roman Empire, women and men who sought to follow the ways of Jesus fled to the Egyptian desert to live in monastic communities.  Living together in intentional community in the most inaccessible of locations, they became known as desert mothers and fathers.…

Worship this Sunday will invite reflection on a period of Christian history known by some scholars as “Classical Christianity.”  We’ll explore how the Bible came into being, how priests rose to power, and how worship shifted from homes to churches as worship evolved from ~150CE to ~600CE. Rebecca Lyman writes, In the second century a wide variety of writings were circulating in the communities for public worship and private devotion.  These writings included several gospels, letters addressed to Christian communities…

We continue to wonder about worship with the question:  Why does the church need to evolve – because people do?  Does God? Let us consider this poem from Anne Broyles book “Meeting God Through Worship.” Companion of the lonely, Binder of wounds, Seeker of lost souls, Friend of the poor, Source of all that is, Forgiver of sins, Voice of the voiceless, Counselor of the confused, Shelter from the storm, Creator of heaven and earth, we in our ways worship…

Yesterday we made the second “stop” on our summer series and shared a Holy Meal in house churches.  We learned about the Didache (The Teaching of the Apostles) which was likely written in the late 1st or early 2nd Century as an instruction manual of sorts for the earliest followers of Jesus. Our series, Evolution of Church, will continue for 6 more weeks with a focus on the shifts in music, prayer, gender roles, and location (as in architecture) of the Christian community.  …

During our series “The Evolution of Church” we have provided the opportunity to wonder about the development of Christian Worship and the origins of our rituals, customs and traditions.  We will answer some of these questions here each week.  We begin this week with this question:   What made them want to make church on Sundays?  The Biblical Scholar Eugene Laverdiere observed:  “Trying to find the origins of Sunday is like trying to find the source of a great river. …