Let’s Make This Year Different
As we enter in to yet another year of school and sports, music rehearsals and play practices, spending time with family and friends, and being church together, here is my challenge and prayer for you … for all of us, really. Let’s make this year different. Let’s make this year special, more intentional, more connected, perhaps more faithful to the faith we so willingly and easily profess. Let’s celebrate not having to be apart anymore, not having to do everything virtually, and finally being able to live out our embodied faith in enfleshed community once again. (Thank God!)
It was the late Frederick Buechner who so famously said, our vocation is “the place where our own deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” This word vocation comes from the Latin vocare, to call—and we all know there are lots of different kinds of voices calling us to all kinds of different work. The problem—or perhaps we might say, the journey—is in figuring out which is the voice of God, rather than that of Society, or the Super-ego, or Self-Interest. And this quest to discern our vocation isn’t something that we believe happens in isolation. It takes a community—a village of people who know you, and see you, and love you, and will challenge you and hold you accountable to reveling in that place of deep gladness, while at the same time ensuring that your eyes remain fixed on the needs of the world and of our own Raleigh community.
And this is what I hope and pray our Adult Faith Formation classes will offer you this Fall: the space to explore and celebrate the deep gladness of your heart, a group with which to learn about the needs of our world, and a supportive group of members and friends who will accompany you, as you grow in your faith and continue to discern who God is calling you to be and what God is calling you to do.
- Looking to meet and connect with other parents of 6th-12th grade youth who will be reading and discussing Wendy Mogel’s The Blessing of a B Minus: Raising Resilient Teenagers?
- Interested in learning more about Philip Yancy’s understanding of “Vanishing Grace: What Ever Happened to The Good News?”
- Been hoping we’d bring back an all-church pastor-led Bible Study in the evenings?
- Ever wondered if the Book of Jonah could actually be relevant to the needs of our 21st-century world?
- Curious to learn about 15 texts from the Old and New Testaments that just may change or jump-start your spiritual life?
Well, the great news is that we have classes starting up this Fall which will speak to all of these! Click here to learn more, and then consider making the commitment to trying something new this year! Let’s do this, friends … together.
Yours in Christ,
Grier