We are starting a new English-language adult education series — we want your input!This Sunday (July 17) we begin an eight-week series on basic Presbyterian doctrinal issues entitled “Being Reformed: Being Presbyterian.” This week will be an introduction to the series; subsequent classes will deal with the Bible, God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, the church, and the future, with a wrap-up session on Sept. 4. Seven different facilitator/teachers will lead this series.
The classes will be held at 11:20 a.m. in South Hall, immediately after English-language and Spanish-language worship and prior to Korean-language worship.
As part of this series, we encourage you to participate by answering a question each week in advance of the class. Even if you can’t attend one or any of the classes, feel free to chime in with your answers; we’ll use them as part of the class discussion.
This week’s question: What does the word “Reformed” mean to you? Feel free to leave a comment below or to email your answer/thought to: BobTatFORE@aol.com.
"Reformed" has two meanings for me.
ReplyDeleteAs a history teacher, it means the product of the Reformation - that revolution against the Catholic church that offered such things as liturgy (and a Bible) in the vernacular, married clergy and direct connection of the ordinary parishioner to God, without the need of intermediaries. The development of it caused wars, panics, massacres, lynchings, regicides, and the development of modern Switzerland. It fractured the Christian faith, but made it more relevant and less paternal.
As a faithful member of a reformed church, one that sees itself as "reformed and ever reforming," I see the term as one which allows our understandings of our faith to grow and shift with the times. We are not in 1st Century Palestine, and God, who believes in the concept of free will and gave us a brain to develop, would not expect us to be static in our understanding of our faith. In the same way that the fearsome God of Abraham became the enveloping parent of Jesus teachings, so too we have grown to be able to understand the wider and wider reach of God's parental arms. And so we continue to grow up as a people - to reform, if you will.