Living the Story

Scripture Text: Romans 8:18-25; John 20:24-29

In Part 4, we discuss what it means to live in the story God is telling through His creation, and seek to identify where we find ourselves in God’s story as a church seeking to serve one another and our city in the 21st century.  As we explore God’s story, we discover four distinct chapters: (1) creation, (2) fall, (3) redemption, and (4) new creation.  And, within each one of these chapters, we find four key relationships at play, namely: (1) the relationship every human being has with God, (2) the relationship every human being has with themselves, (3) the relationship every human being has with other people, and (4) the relationship human beings have with the world.

Reflecting the Image

Scripture Text: Deuteronomy 6:4-9; Mark 12:29-34

In Part 3, we descend from the great heights of a theological conversation about the person of God and into the details of our everyday lives. We will ask the question, “what does it mean to reflect God’s image both individually and corporately?” We will answer this in four ways: by worshipping, by prayer and studying the Bible, by belonging to and participating with the Church, and by working for renewal. As we move through these four ways of reflecting the image of God, our hope is that a vision for a counter-cultural life of faith will take shape - a life that is defined and ordered by God’s story, our deep longings and His character and not by the temptations and pressures of our contemporary society.

Staring at the Sun

Scripture Text: Genesis 12:1-3; John 1:14-18

In Part 2 we descend from the grand meta-narrative of the world and the over-arching themes of human existence to the particular story of the God of the Bible and His historic people - the nation of Israel. We hope to answer a few questions:

• Who is God?

• What is the role of the nation of Israel in God’s story?

• Who is Jesus?

• What is the role of Jesus in God’s story?

• Who is the Holy Spirit?

• What is the role of the Spirit in God’s story?

Echoes of a Voice

Scripture Text: Ecclesiastes 3:11-13; John 7:37-38

In Part 1, we will take a step back and look at four areas of our contemporary life that point towards something. What that something is is not immediately clear to everyone - but we can perceive that there are clues ingrained into the fabric of the universe and our lives that act as “strange signposts - pointing beyond the landscape of our contemporary culture and out into the unknown.”

These four signposts are things that we all have in common, they are echoes that every human being can hear. They are: the longing for justice, the quest for spirituality, the hunger for relationships, and the delight in beauty.