"Study Guide" for Mere Christianity

Hey Matt and Ed,
I found a "study guide" for Mere Christianity. It looks like it has a few discussion questions for the end of each chapter. I've posted it here.

Recap

If you missed Sunday School last week, we laid out the plan for the next couple of months. Here's the proposed plan: We will finish up the Prodigal Son study next week. Following the Prodigal son we intend to start a new study on the CS Lewis book, "Mere Christianity". You can buy the book here or you can get a copy from Scott on Wednesday or in class. After that, the whole thing's up for grabs...We plan on having another get together where we bring several different options for studies and we'll decide based on those options. If you have any books, studies, topics, etc. speak up and we'll consider it.

Material for the current study

I know this is a little late but here is a link to the handout that Matt put together for the prodigal son study. Just click on it to download. Also, you'll see the image that is referenced in the book below.

What's next?

I know, I know, we just started a new lesson series in Sunday School. We've only just begun...But, as Ed reminded me yesterday, we are only about two Sundays away from not having a scheduled lesson. So, what's next? I'd really like to get some ideas from everyone out there so that Matt, Ed and I aren't dictating the content of the class. Don't get me wrong, I would love to continue to tell you to go and ignore all the rules. I'm sure Ed has a long list of rules he'd like us to follow in addition to the 10 commandments. As far as Matt's concerned...well, I'm not sure he'd like to do. But we don't want to be the one's who pick all of the lessons.

Alright, enough whining, start shelling out your ideas. Let us know in the comments section so that we can get a bunch of ideas out there. Do it now, it's easy, just click the comments link. You can do it!

The Prodigal Son

Thanks Matt & Monica for the first installment of the Prodigal Son. We had some interesting discussion today, I hope it continues. If anyone is interested in getting the book you can purchase it by clicking here.

A few topics that came up today would make interesting future studies:

1. The roles a person plays in their family (e.g., mother, father, trouble maker).
2. Christian mentoring.
3. The church family as surrogate family for other church members.

If you have anything to say about these topics or something that was mentioned that I may have forgotten feel free to put it in the comments section.

e-mail

I sent out the following e-mail today:

Hey everybody. Matt and I were tossing around ideas for our Sunday school class the other day. We thought it would be nice to have input from other people in the class. However, we also recognized that the limited amount of time we spend together would hinder the number and quality of ideas that we could come up with. So, we thought we would try to put together an online method for communicating, the result was this blog. Check it out. Add your two cents and pass it on to anyone who might be interested.

If you've come here please let me know by posting a comment. You can do this by clicking on the comment link below this message.

C S Lewis, Christian Behavior

The following is an excerpt from a book that may be a good for an upcoming study. Has anyone read this book?


"I know the words ‘leave it to God’ can be misunderstood, but they must stay for the moment. The sense in which a Christian leaves it to God is that he puts all his trust in Christ: trusts that Christ will somehow share with him the perfect human obedience which He carried out from His birth to His crucifixion: that Christ will make the man more like Himself, and in a sense, make good his deficiencies. If you like to put it that way, Christ offers something for nothing: He even offers everything for nothing. In a sense the whole Christian life consists in accepting that very remarkable offer. But the difficulty is to reach the point of recognizing that all we have done and can do is nothing. What we should have liked would be for God to count our good points and ignore our bad ones…if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already."
C S Lewis, Christian Behavior