Pathways Church Blog

We will not be meeting for Core Group this week. Instead, we want to encourage you to attend several significant sessions at Seattle Pacific University with us. N.T. Wright, is a man who has garnered the respect of John and I as a Christian, as a scholar and as a critical thinker.

Here are the times he will be speaking.

Wednesday May 18:
7:30 pm in Upper Gwinn
President’s Symposium: Decoding the Davinci Code: The Challenge of Historic Christianity to Post-Modern Fantasy

Thursday May 19:
9:30 am at First Free Methodist Church (located on 3rd Avenue directly across from campus)
President’s Symposium: The Bible and Christian Imagination

7:30 pm at First Free Methodist Church
President’s Symposium: God, the Tsunami, and 9/11: The new problem of evil

http://www.spu.edu/special/symposia/wrightinfo.asp

I’m sure that John has more to add to this, but what I’m trying to say is get yourself there at all costs! What N.T. is saying, is what the church needs to hear.

Quote of the Week

“I believe it to be a great mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense in it…. We cannot blink at the fact that gentle Jesus meek and mild was so stiff in his opinions and so inflammatory in his language that he was thrown out of church, stoned, hunted from place to place, and finally gibbeted as a firebrand and a public danger. Whatever his peace was, it was not the peace of an amiable indifference.” – Dorothy Sayers

We studied the persecution of Stephen this week. If ever a guy had the opportunity to come off as the nice guy in the story, it was Stephen. He was selected, in the midst of great upheaval in Jewish history, to help feed the widows. That is a nice guys job. Who can get mad at a guy who steps up and takes care of widows? Yet, while Stephen was reaching out to those in need, he was well rounded in his faith. His faith was not solely about “action”, but it was also about a message that rocked his world and will soon rock the world of a young man who stood by at Stephen’s death – giving approval to it.

Sometimes we fall into the trap of believing that if we simply demonstrate the love of Jesus, the world will embrace us. I wish it were so, but the love and grace of Jesus has been resisted for thousands of years and will be resisted for as long as we grace this earth. In the midst of that, the church should never create barriers that will keep people from seeing God for who He is. The church has done that for far too long. Let’s rip down barriers – if people reject Jesus and his love and grace, that is their choice, but let us not give them reason to reject Him simply because the church does not model what He lived.

Last night in Core Group, we worked our way through Acts 6:1-7. As the community of believers in Jerusalem continued to grow, there was more to do than the disciples could handle. Here are a few observations we made as we discussed the passage:

1. The disciples knew that they were the most qualified to continue the teaching of Jesus and that they needed to focus on that. At the same time, they knew it was important for the church to continue to do the things Jesus had taught them to do — in this case, meet physical needs.
2. Even the task of distributing food was not taken lightly, as the disciples specifically chose men who were full of the Spirit and wisdom. They weren’t just looking for able bodies, but Godly hearts. Because they chose men of Godly character, these men were able to rise to prominence in the spreading of the kingdom, and we will see examples of this through Stephen and Philip in the next few weeks. As Godly people of character are given opportunties to stretch out their gifts through Pathways, who knows what God has in store for them!
3. This section closes noting that even a large number of priests were beginning to follow Jesus. After all the spiritually glamorous things that had happened in the early church, why did that happen after this seemingly mundane event? Perhaps it was because they were seeing genuine authentic faith inaction. For so long, the Jewish religion had been sidetracked to just doing the right things. Here was a group of people who were so genuine and authentic about their faith that, though God was doing pretty incredible things among them, they were serious about meeting the needs of individuals. What they were teaching was real, and they were living it out. Perhaps that was fresh water for so many priests who had been caught in the duty of their religion for so long and they were beginning to take notice. We closed out the night praying that we too could draw people through the combination of a solid understanding of Truth, combined with a community of people putting that truth in action. We prayed that we could continue the work of Jesus, adn that the world would take notice.