Scot McKnight has a blog that I’ve referenced in the past as he has some good insights on our lives of faith.

In one blog post, he responds to a student who is struggling with prayer because he hasn’t prayed for a while, and he’s problems with the prayers of the church and how they don’t reflect common speech.

Click here for the letter and Dr. McKnight’s response.

This Thursday, September 17, will be our first Thursday night study to start up the 2009-2010 school year. We will be starting a unit on The Lord’s Prayer using a series of videos from Concordia Seminary St. Louis, Martin Luther’s Large and Small Catechism, as well as anything that deems itself pertinent and interesting.

For this first session we’ll be going over an introduction to prayer along with some info on Luther’s intentions for using the catechism and the Lord’s prayer as a part of our prayer life.

After a great summer schedule of fun events and a Sunday morning Bible study, we will be moving back to our regularly scheduled Thursday night studies. We will start back on September 17th at 7:30 pm at the Moll home. If you have any preferences on what we should study, please comment on this post. If you have any questions or need directions, please feel free to e-mail me at: tmollicus@gmail.com.

Tommy Moll

Please pray for Brandon as he transitions into a new (old) job up in the Dallas area. I’ll let everyone know when I get his new address.

Here’s an interesting article on common church beliefs on Mary, the mother of Jesus.

It might suprise you to see what early Lutherans taught on Mary.

Mars Hill Bible Church (Rob Bell’s church) hosted Jeff Manion as a guest preacher a couple weeks ago and guess what he taught on…… 1 John. The teaching comes from 1 John 2:6-11 and concentrates on the idea of darkness and light in our lives. Follow the links below to listen (45 minutes) and/or read a summary and consider some discussion questions.

audio

discussion sheet

This week I’ve been looking at some posts from the Jesus Creed blog from a devotional resource called Faith and Culture.

I thouhgt I would link this post as it brings up some interesting points about earth and the writier is from Grove City so eat your heart our Blake.

Consider the questions at the end of the post.

In our 1 John study we’ve had the discussion of what it means to serve our neighbor and how we are to love others in this world.

Shane Claiborne presents his thoughts in an article called: Downward Mobility.

His perspective comes from serving and sharing Jesus through community and relationships. What do you think? Do agree with his perspective on organizations? How might his ideal work itself out in a place like Crown of Life? Does this article encourage any specific action for you?

Study: 1 John Session 7

Text: 1 John 2:18-27

What does it mean that something or someone is an antichrist? Are there antichrists around today?

In Session 7 we’ll explore what antichrist means and how we are to be prepared to handle attacks against our faith.

[Session 7 happens to fall on Lydia's birthday]

Study: 1 John Session 6

Text: 1 John 2:15-17

For Session 6 we will be looking at what it means that we live in the world, but we are not to love the world. Another way of putting this might be to say that even though we feel the pull of those things that oppose Christ and His will in this world, we do not love them. Luther says that, “To be in the world, to see the world, to feel the world, is a different thing from loving the world; just as to have and to feel sin is a different thing from loving sin.”