Communion Reformation

Here's the document from Pastor Shawn explaining a bit about our Communion Reformation. Communion Reformation 09

Quotes from "Blue Like Jazz"

Here are a couple of the quotes I referenced from Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz:

"Living in community made me realize one of my faults: I was addicted to myself. All I thought about was myself. The only think I really cared about was myself. I had very little concept of love, altruism, or sacrifice. I discovered that my mind is like a radio that picks up only one station, the one that plays me: K-DON, all Don, all the time."

*****

"It's like in that movie About a Boy where Nick Horby's chief character, played by Hugh Grant, believes that life is a play about himself, that all other characters are only acting minor roles in a story that centers around him. My life felt like that. Life was a story about me because I was in every scene. In fact, I was the only one in every scene. I was everywhere I went. If somebody walked into my scene, it would frustrate me because they were disrupting the general theme of the play, namely my comfort or glory. Other people were flat characters in my movie, lifeless characters. Sometimes I would have scenes with them, dialogue, and they would speak their lines, and I would speak mine. But the movie, the grand movie stretching from Adam to the Antichrist, was about me. I wouldn't have told you that at the time, but that is the way I lived."

*****

"The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: Life is a story about me."

*****

"No rut in the mid is so deep as the one that says I am the world, the world belongs to me, all people are characters in my play. There is no addiction so powerful as self-addiction."

Session #5: The Fall & The Bad News of Christianity

Lesson 5 (the Bad News)

Our problem in evangelism...

"Our problem in evangelism is not that we don't have enough information--it is that we don't know how to be ourselves. We forget we are called to be witnesses to what we have seen and know, not to what we don't know. The key is authenticity and obedience, not a doctorate in theology. We haven't grasped that it really is okay for us to be who we are, when we are with non-Christians, even if we don't have all the answers to their questions or if our knowledge of Scripture is limited."

Rebecca Manley Pippert
Out of the Salt-shaker & into the World

Session #4: The Fall

Lesson 4 (the Fall)

Not the Way It's Supposed to Be

We've made reference to a book by Cornelius Plantinga entitled, Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin. Here's a link to it on Amazon.ca.

Good article on calling & vocation

During our class on vocation, I referenced an article by Gene Edward Veith in which he said, "'Justification by faith alone'is surely the most important contribution of the Reformation. The second most important, arguably, is the 'doctrine of vocation.'"

Here's a link to that article. Enjoy!