9/19/21 - The great return! The first programs of the 2021-22 schoolyear!

Good morning parents! 

To say that this update has been a long time coming is a criminal understatement. It almost feels appropriate to reiterate why these posts happen and how I hope they can be of use to you! 

Every week that we have programming, you can expect one of these posts to go up and fill you in on what we are talking about and give you a few key ways you might be able to continue the conversation at home! I try hard to keep my "voice" in these posts as well, so as you read them I hope you feel like you are able to get to know me a little better as well! 

This week in Sunday school, Liz Boerman launched us back into one of our favorite curriculums. We are working through a book series published by the Fuller Youth Institute that is designed to help your students grapple with some of the harder questions they will encounter in faith. The beautiful thing about this material is that it intentionally doesn't give us an answer, so there is no limitation on what we can or can't discuss. The question we are looking at in the next couple weeks is "Is Jesus really the only way to heaven?" I wasn't able to be at Sunday school this week because I am coordinating the Fellowship Sunday school class in Pastor Roger's absence, but I hear that the conversation was excellent! Your students were asking questions about things like predestination and "Does God know when he creates someone that they will be a serial killer?" Heavy stuff, but good stuff! If you are looking to continue the conversation at home, it sounds like predestination might be a good place to start!!

Youth group was fantastic. We had pizza, played some family feud, a little dodgeball, and began our Bible Project series on Spiritual Beings. The material we are using has the potential to be a little "heady," but I think that as we continue to push into it it will get a bit easier. This week we talked about the existence of spiritual beings and the nature of the Hebrew language that describes them. One of the pitfalls that the RCA can fall into is thinking that the only "main characters" within scripture are God and humans. The Biblical authors did not think this way, and spiritual beings played a large role in their concept of the world and humanity's role within it. 

We primarily focused on the creation story in Genesis 1-3, but where modern Christians tend to hang up on the chronology and detail of how the world was made, the author of Genesis spends significant time describing the heavenly host and humans interaction with them. God creates all that we know in those chapters, and He often gives authority to certain things to "rule" over that creation. Light and dark rule night and day, and humans are charged with ruling the land. God seems to give "authority" to what we would consider inanimate objects, but most people in ancient near eastern culture would have seen them as "heavenly beings" that were spiritual in nature. 

I'm not advocating that we engage in star worship all of a sudden, but I do think that we need to be willing to reframe how we might see things from a 21st century lens. So as we press into this study and talk a little more about who these beings are that scripture references, you might have some questions come home! This week felt a little like I hit them with a fire hose, so I'm planning to take it a little slower next week! We're planning to focus on just one word - Elohim. It should spark some fun discussion! 

Thanks as always for stopping by to check on what we are talking about! Have a wonderful week!