I’ve had for sometime the idea to write posts based on questions I am asked via email or questions that people ask google and somehow land on my site. In fact I’ve been compiling some questions since early this summer on my Theo.edit (my wiki). Thus I am going to begin a bi-monthly segment answering some of these question or “Frequently Asked Questions of a Christian Theologian.” Then once I am done, I will either link to or post the answers on the wiki for later use.
Archives For The Lord’s Prayer
This Sunday I am leading a discussion on the Lord’s Prayer, basically covering what I’ve been writting about here for the past month or so. In preparing I decided to create a few Queries to help begin the discussion on Prayer and mission.
Here are those queries:
a. When has prayer led you to live differently?
b. How can the simple prayers of your heart reflect Gods redeeming power in your life?
c. What are the values you wish to see represented in the life of the church? Do these reflect the desires of the Lord?
d. When do you feel your prayers are most effective?
e. Will you allow the Lord’s Prayer to form you spiritually and missionally? What would it look like if your life was guided by this prayer?
If there are ones that minister to you specifically, or if you feel led to share one of your own please feel free to do so.
technorati tags:queries, lords prayer, prayer life, missional prayer
Blogged with Flock
Continuing my series on the Lord’s Prayer and how it functions as both a mission statement and community formating guide for the churchh. We now direct our attention to further exposition of the prayer itself – this post in particular deals with Matthew 6:10-11.
Mike Work, writing on his class blog recently, wrote a great short post about Jesus’ way of being a storyteller. He writes,
In his [NT Wright] words, Jesus made a regular practice of retelling the story of Israel in such a way as to subvert other tellings, and to invite his hearers to make his telling of the story their own (174).??? The prominent locus of this was in the parables, which told the story of Israel, but tweaked it, often shifting the boundaries and reversing the outcomes of the story. One prominent motif was the divine status reversal, with those well-off in the present often coming out not so well. These stories did something; they painted an alternative future, which countered the visible reality of Jesus day.
Mike’s comment stirred my mind in two directions, one is directly related to the first verse of Lord’s Prayer and the other has to do with Quakerism (next post).
In this continuing series on the Lord’s Prayer I am looking at the Jewish prayer known as the Qaddish, and comparing it to the Lord’s Prayer. When we compare these two prayers we see themes arise that are particularly interesting when we consider that Christ’s prayer is intentionally tweaked to include rather subversive value, which give us clues into how he understood the Kingdom of God.
Continue Reading…
Getting back on track of doing some work on the Lord’s Prayer I thought I would offer a simple prayer service we used for small group a while back. This could work as a personal time for reflection or for small groups, and can be changed and modified to your own liking. This is set up to have multiple participate and can involve a meal if you want to go for a longer meeting.
This is my ping homily for April, there are still two weeks left for all of you to participate. If you are interested jump over to Shawn’s explanation of the project.
Since I am in the process of thinking and writing about the Lord’s Prayer as a paradigm for community and missional formation for churches it seemed a fitting time to discuss how the prayer points us in the direction of a humble life.
Continue Reading…
Today is my first chance to lecture in a classroom setting. As I have been preparing over the last couple weeks, I have found that I will never get it the way I want it. I have been writing and rewriting parts of it for the last three days and am not really sure that I’ve got it right. I am not really nervous about doing it, which is somewhat of a surprise for me. I am usually terrified to preach in front of people; I figured teaching would give me the same feeling.
The lecture is on community formation and mission, two things that tend to get split up in the church. The mission boards and spiritual life committees rarely dream of working together or being the same group of people, yet I think not doing it this way is a disservice to the church. Discipleship and mission both inform one another and are interrelated.
