This Season at Emmanuel…

The Bible is a collection of ancient stories of people seeking to follow God. These stories, told from a human perspective, invite the reader to witness the lives of people who struggled with what it means to love God and to live in a manner that reflected God’s love.

Over the years the Bible has been read and interpreted and taught. It has been used to create pathways of spiritual formation, to bring an understanding of what an intentional community centered around God might look like, and to offer guidelines around how one might live in a way that honours God. But it has also been reduced to cliches, pat answers, and bumper stickers. It has been used as a weapon, as a means of control, as a treatise for political agendas, as permission to take land and perpetuate injustice, as a way to silence voices of dissent, and so on.

So how do we approach reading and understanding the Bible? How do we connect with a collection of stories and accounts that are thousands of years old? How do make sense of the difficult images of a God depicted as being fierce, vengeful, and full of wrath? How do we navigate passages that have been used to divide, exclude, and create hierarchies? How do we connect or reconnect with the Bible in a way that is helpful, and healthy, and aligns us with the nature of God?  

Peter Enns puts it this way:  The Bible holds out for us an invitation to participate in the timeless and sacred responsibility of working out for ourselves what faith in God looks like here and now, of owning the process, with no accompanying checklist of one-size-fits-all solutions, no safety net of prescripted responses, and no fear that God will bring down the hammer on us for accepting the challenge of faith. 

You are invited to join us this fall as we push into these questions and open dialogue around how to best approach, understand, interpret, and apply to our living all that the Bible holds for us.

Our weekly community gathering is held on Sundays at 10:30 am. You can also watch the livestream of our service.