 |
A Course of Study, Practice, and |
For some time, and especially since my return from Sabbatical in '05, I have been praying about how to take our spiritual formation processes at St Stephens to a new level. I have an idea, and I would like to invite you to consider joining me. I would like to offer a 30 week course called “Learning From Jesus”. We would meet on Sunday evenings for an hour and a half, gathering to read, think and talk about the fundamental dynamics of Christian spiritual formation, becoming a special learning community. People who decide to join this course will be asked to not miss more than three meetings through the year, and will be reading several books along the way and putting into practice what we learn. We will be using the classical resources for spiritual formation that have been gathered and presented by Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, the Renovere movement - and we would be focused on Christlikeness as our goal. The whole atmosphere of our work together will be rooted in and fueled by the grace God so freely gives us in Jesus. The first half of the course would be focused on God, his goodness, his grace, his redemption and his Kingdom. The second half would be focused on living from the resources of that Kingdom, and how Kingdom living transforms our anger, lust, lying, greed, etc. into the Christlikeness promised as the fruit of the gospel. I would hope that in January, we could get away for a retreat, and would have developed a shared set of concepts that we were working on and living out. We will want to put what we learn into action in our own lives, praying for one another, learning and practicing new grace-habits, and encouraging each other. By the time we finish in May, we would each begin to form a personalized "Rule of Life" that we were thinking through and living into. |
