Our 2023-24 Christian Education year resumed Sunday morning, August 20th at 9:30.
Christian Education exists for the teaching and instructing of God’s covenant people in the persons and work of the Triune God.
We have Christian Education for all ages starting at 9:30 on Sunday mornings. CE runs parallel with the standard school year (Fall and Spring semesters) and breaks for the summer.
Adult Christian Education –
We typically try to alternate studying a book from the Old Testament followed by a book from the New Testament.
In 2022-2023 we studied the book of Romans as taught by our Pastoral Intern, Dr. Jared Brown.
For the 2023-2024 school year, the adults will be studying the Old Testament book of Jeremiah, taught by our elders and our Pastoral Intern for 2023-24, Paul Yu.
Observation / Interpretation / Application
As in our past studies through James, John, & Judges and 1 and 2 Samuel, our goal as we study Romans in the Adult class, is to find the author’s original purpose and message to the original audience. Then once we understand the main thing the author is trying to say, we can see both applications for the original audience, and us today. As we’ve been studying the past several years, we’ve been using the following steps. Observation… Interpretation… Application…
- Observation – What do I see? (In this step we ask questions to better understand what we are reading)
- Who – Who is involved in the story or letter? Who is the author? Who is he writing to?
- What – What is going on? What is the setting? Take a step back and look at the context surrounding the passage
- Where – Where does the text come from? Where is the story taking place?
- When – When was the text written? When did the story occur?
- How – How is the text communicated? What form or genre is it? Is it a letter, history, poetry, wisdom literature, apocalyptic literature, etc…
- Why – Why is the author communicating this passage
- Interpretation – What does it mean?
- After we have made observations, we move to interpretation, where we try to figure out what the passage means. What was the original author trying to say to the original audience. What was the author’s “Big Idea”.
- Application – Based on what I have seen and what it means, how should I then live?
- Application asks the question, “So what? What do I do with this?”.
- Application is the last step, because it is based on the text. It is tethered to the observations and interpretation of the text.
- Although there is only one interpretation, there can be many applications.
Please contact the office for more information. You can find audio of most of our previous classes below.