Today was a second face-to-face to finish up our course on the New Testament. A good course which raised some good questions. Today the instructor went back through the last five weeks of questions and spent time talking about the implications of context when reading the Gospels and the Letters.
The Gospels were written after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The church which had been largely Jewish tried to make sense of this in the light of the hope of a quick return of Christ who would establish the Kingdom of God.
Paul was a Jewish man of the first century whose mission was to bring the Gentiles in to the community of faith. He wasn't converting them to Judaism but to Christ... but he wasn't tearing down Judaism either.
This course could have gone on another few weeks easily.
I've now begun what is called, Deacon's Pastoral Care. This is modeled after Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) but clearly is a watered down version. Still it's going to take some time and effort. I appreciate the School of Formation's attempt to give us an experience that is practical and rigorous. We'll be writing up "verbatims" and also presenting a couple of "teachings" dealing with practical aspects of pastoral care as it might relate to deacons.
No comments:
Post a Comment