Fall Seminar on Scripture

Registration is now open for our Fall Seminar, the Early Church in Devotion to Scripture.  This one will be held at The Upper Room church in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, PA.  It will also be available online.

I encourage you to consider taking this seminar.  We will be reading some of the greatest Scripture teachers in Christian history.

House of St. Michael the Archangel Blog

The House of St. Michel the Archangel is Tim and Matt's vision for a community immersed in the Scriptures and the Fathers. They seek to "operate a house with a life of worship, prayer, and reflection on the Scriptures and the historic Christian Faith, for a total Christian perspective on existence."  Read more about their vision here.

They have launched a new blog, which will feature regular reflections on ancient Christian writings.  I invite you to check it out.  Two reflections are already posted, and each is very challenging and thought-provoking.

Seminar Response

Among the participants in our recently-completed seminar on Prayer and Worship was a group of elders from First Presbyterian Church of Tulsa.  Tim and Matt had the opportunity to fly there twice to interact with them in person.  Here is what their senior pastor, Dr. Jim Miller, had to say about the experience:

The Ancient Christian Faith Initiative invites Christians to take the blessings of our heritage seriously.  Reading, pondering, and praying over the writings of early Church leaders is a powerful antidote to the shallow spiritualities of our own day.  Timothy Becker and Matthew Bell, both Ph.D. candidates in Patristics, have the rare gift of leading twenty-first century disciples of Jesus into the writings and lessons of ancient Christian faith.

As part of our new elder development ministry, First Presbyterian Church, Tulsa, invited Tim and Matt to lead us on an eight-week series, diving deep into the pool of ancient Christian witness.  This was completely new terrain for most of these First Church leaders.  But the experience was rich and fruitful at so many different levels.

With enthusiasm and confidence I am happy to recommend the Ancient Christian Faith Initiative to local congregations. 

 

 

Reading Revelation

In the last week of our seminar on prayer and worship, we read the Book of Revelation. This was the most familiar of our readings, since it is part of Scripture. It does not seem nearly as strange to us as ancient writers like Pseudo-Dionysius. And yet, it was really the strangest thing we read by far. Imagine reading Revelation without having been previously exposed to it: most of us would tear our hair out trying to figure out what is going on. And yet: do we really know what it means, or have we merely gotten comfortable with the language of Scripture's stranger sections, without truly grasping it?

Despite having a seminary degree, I have never seriously studied Revelation (and certain other books), and reading Revelation anew challenged me that I need to do so. God has given me the

great privilege of His truth revealed in Scripture, and I have simply not been interested enough to receive all of it.

One of the striking insights of Revelation is how connected worship is to everything that happens in the world. Repeatedly in the book, worship accompanies the defeat of evil. One could push
that further and say that worship IS the defeat of evil--since evil consists of the failure to acknowledge and worship God. A theologian named John Webster said it this way: "Praise is the great act of rebellion against sin."

The question, then, is: is this how we view our worship? Do we think that we are participating in God's victory over evil when we gather on Sunday? Do we realize that we are taking part in a world-transforming act? More often, I think we see ourselves as retreating from the world, taking a brief rest in God's presence, before we have to go out there and get to work again.
When we think about this, it is unsurprising that many Christians have trouble connecting worship to service. In fact, the two have become antithetical: some Christians worship, while others go out and help the poor. Some are accused of "being too heavenly-minded to do any earthly good." Such a statement has no place in Revelation, though: the "heavenly-minded" are the ones who see and take part in God's mighty acts in the world. If being "heavenly-minded" leads us to disengage from the world, than what we have in our minds is not heaven at all, but an idolatrous illusion.

How can we worship in a way that reflects the divine reality?

How can we worship conscious that we are participants in the heavenly worship and in God's victory over sin and evil in the world?

How can worship be more connected to the battles in our own lives?

These are the questions with which Revelation has left me.