Today we begin a new season as a church community.
Our fasting and prayer together grew us closer to one another and to God in the beginning of 2011. This journey through Matthew until the May Long Weekend will go further.
As I go through this reading plan with everyone else, I'm going to post my notes from each day's reading here. I hope that this will be an encouragement, example, and inspiration as you also go through and make your own discoveries.
Besides the reading plan, I am also making my way through the New Testament again. I'm going a lot slower this time, and I'm checking through all of my notes as I do it. I'm doing some editing, and a lot of additional note taking as well. As I finish each book, I'll post my study notes here. I humbly submit them, and do hope that they will help you in your own study. If there is interest, I may bind them into a zine for the church when I'm done.
I'm also writing three books this year. I don't necessarily intend to finish all three before 2012, but I'll be getting a good chunk of them done at least. The first one will be a book introducing the Bible to Anarchists. I want to do it well. I want to do it honestly, and intellectually honestly. This means that I don't want to start writing until at least after I've finished reading through the New Testament for this third time. The second book will be about Community living and the Church. I'll borrow heavily from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Henri Nouwen, and Jean Vanier. I intend to write this book in tandem with a ten to twelve week sermon series in our church, sometime after we're done Matthew. The last book is fiction, and deals with issues of Jesus life and contemporary activism. I'll include some of my writing plans here in this blog as they develop.
Finally, I recognize that as a preaching pastor, my influences will be influencing those who hear me preach whether they know it or not. So in the interest of full disclosure, every week I will post an entry of my "influences". This will be something about the books I'm reading, the movies and TV I'm watching, and maybe the music I'm listening to. blogs . . . magazines perhaps.. . The spirit of it is simply to let you know where I'm at, what I'm thinking about, and give you a little extra context to where the stuff I'm talking about on Sunday is coming from.
So this is for you, my church. I love you, you Monk Punks. You Look to the Cross for Victory-ans. ahem. (I'm kidding).
If you're reading, and finding this helpful or encouraging, please let me know. If there's something you want to see more (or less) of here, please let me know. It's for you.
Be blessed,
-Shawn
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