This fall, the Our World, God’s Eyes class has used the book What’s the least I can believe and still be a Christian? as inspiration to talk about societal pressures that we as Christians face in our daily lives and how we might exemplify our Christian faith while not turning non-Christians off to our beliefs.
We currently meet every Wednesday night from 8:00-9:00pm in the youth lounge, and even though we know the time is late, we encourage anyone who is interested in an adult-ed ‘Sunday school’ class on a weeknight to attend. We have discussed some of the core foundations of the faith, such as “Where do you see God in your life? What is our role in God’s kingdom? Do mainline Christians believe in getting ‘saved’?” We’ve also dived into some hard questions like “Do good Christians have doubt? How do we as Christians view people who identify as a different sexual orientation than ourselves?” as well as others.
Future Topics
Going forward this spring, we will continue to use the book as a springboard to topics, but on a week-to-week basis we, as a group, will come up with what the topics of discussion will be that we talk about. Right now we are going through some of the social statements that are public from the ELCA to see if we as a body of Christ are acting on any of these social statements, or to see if we as individuals agree with the stances of the body of the church (and if there are disagreements we talk about how these disagreements should not get in the way of our faith but be good conversation starters to figure out potential solutions or ways to act on our faith).
Our group will also be participating in an environmental project that I believe is being led by Vicar Avery, and we will hopefully be learning more about this project and how we can serve on February 1st when Vicar Avery will be dropping by to discuss science and faith and his upcoming project.