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Every Thursday night we meet in small groups and take a careful look at God’s Word.
We want to start off this year by thinking together about how, where and with whom we belong. In the midst of change and transition, we find assurance in the fact that we continue to belong; to God, to one another and in this broken and beautiful world where we’re called to live as agents of God’s love.
If you’re wondering where you fit in and are looking for a community where you can belong, come join us!
We’ll kick things off on September 29 at Chapel on the AVE. Dinner starts at 6. Small groups start at 7.
Whether you’re a new student or a returning student, we invite you to join us for dinner on Thursday, September 29 at Chapel on the Ave. at 6 P.M.
Stick around to hear about GCF’s fall quarter offerings (small groups, discussions, prayer gatherings) and to meet this year’s leadership team, our pastors and all the rest of the students who make up this wonderful student community.
In the summer, we read books. So, we encourage you to join a book group with fellow students.
Meeting times are still being worked out, so stay tuned. But do go ahead and plan to join a book group and purchase the book you want to read. Also, we’ve tried to note the level of commitment that is required to be a part of book group. Please pay attention to that. If you’re thinking: Eek, I don’t have time to read a book this summer, then check out what we’re doing Thursday nights or join us for Morning Prayer.
Where did the Bible come from? Who wrote it? Can we really trust what it says? Can we approach it as critical, thinking people or must it be taken in faith? Where’s the balance? If you’ve wondered some of these questions and you’re up for a dense read and a hearty academic discussion about the book we love (the Bible), this is a summer group for you. It will meet every other week on Monday nights. To really participate in this group, you will need to buy and, yes, actually read this scholarly work on the Bible. You’ll be blessed. Join us!
Because we care about reconciliation and, ultimately, unity in God’s body and the world, let’s learn a little more about how we might go about getting ourselves there. And let’s do this together. Reading a book is never enough. And on issues of race and reconciliation, we really feel this tension. YET, we’ve got learning to do. And our hope is that our learning might really spur us toward action. Some of you have been reading this book. Others of you might still want to buy it. We’ll start meeting soon over lunch to discuss and pray and work our way through this journey of reconciliation. Join us!
If you’re interested in reading a book that will challenge your heart as well as your mind, take a look at this Henri Nouwen book. It’s for those of us who want to go a little deeper in our spiritual (and actual) walk with God. We’ll discuss the themes of hospitality and authenticity and others that are raised in this book over three lunch meetings in the second have of the summer. Buy the book, read the book. And we’ll get the lunch dates to you. It’s not a hard read, but it’s worth a slow read…There’s stuff here to really ponder and apply to life. Join us!
The Grad and Faculty Lunch group is still in the process of selecting what book they’re going to read Christ and Culture Revisited by D.A. Carson. In our conversations, we’ll focus on how we, as Christians, relate to the broader culture. This group will meet bi-weekly over lunch on campus, as it does throughout the school year.
AND because not all reading over the summer needs to be academic and non-fiction, we invite everyone to read for the first time or re-read for the sixth time, Madeleine L’Engle’s, A Wrinkle In Time. We’re reading it and you should too. We’ll meet for ONE evening discussion of this book toward the end of the summer. And there’s rumblings on the interwebs that a new movie adaptation is in the works, so when/if this comes to be, we’ll go see it together. FUN.
Where do you see God in what you research, write, teach? Why?
These and more are are the questions we’ll be asking and seeking to answer this summer.
Some of the questions are related to this thing of vocation or “calling.” This is the idea we have that we’re actually made, gifted, equipped for and even invited into a particular career by God. How do we discern this?And what’s the theological and biblical basis behind it all?
Some of the questions are deeply personal. When we ask: where do you see God in what you research, the emphasis is on the you. Where do you see God in your research? Have you even thought about this question?
We’ll meet every other Thursday night. All of our gatherings will start with food. Some of our gatherings will include teaching on vocation. Others will include sharing by you. All will be meaningful.
Join us.
Thursday nights in the summer begin with a kickoff BBQ at Geoff and Ashley’s at 6 P.M. on July 23rd.
In C.S. Lewis’ essay Learning in War-Time, he opens with the question of whether it is right, or morally responsible, to devote our lives to learning. Is academia a frivolous waste of time, when we could be telling people about Jesus, or is there a deeper significance to a life of learning? And if learning is worthwhile on an eternal scale, are some questions more worthy than others?
I am convinced that the academic life is right and fitting for Christians. Much of what we do in academia is a pursuit of learning, which for us is a pursuit of both truth and beauty. Augustine says something along the lines of “all truth is God’s truth,” and King David, in the psalms – along with countless others – admires God’s beauty reflected in the world. Any time we are seeking truth and beauty in a way that uses our gifts to their fullest extent, we are glorifying and seeking God.
Not only that, but learning is one of the ways we can love God. The oldest prayer in Judaism is this command from Deuteronomy: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.” Jesus changes that command, saying “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” Neal Plantinga, in Pray the Lord My Mind to Keep, says that the primary goal of Christians engaged in the intellectual life is “that we are trying to become better lovers. We want to love God with all our mind. Of course we want to offer our hearts to God… and the same with our souls. But we are also intellectual beings, and Jesus Christ calls us to mindful love; he calls us to intellectual love.” Intellectual love includes not just studying God Himself, but studying what God has made – both creation and humanity.
Still, are there better and worse questions for us to study? We are, time and again, called to care for “the least of these,” for the widows, the orphans, the sick, and the dispossessed. If we can care for these people through our work, it seems right and valuable to do so – and we need members of the Body of Christ to take up this call. But God takes a much longer view of our work than we can. If we, even though we are human and limited, can see that each person’s tiny contribution to the vast body of research brings our picture of the world and of humanity a little closer to reality, how much more might God, who sees the whole picture from the start – God, who is the ultimate Reality – call us to work towards that end? And since it is God who created the world in its unimaginable complexity and variety, and who created all of humanity, it is worthwhile for us to study it. All of it.
But even if we may rightly study any question, following Jesus in the academy does (or should) affect the way we do our work. Our faith does not necessarily change our pipetting technique, calculations, reading summaries, or code, but it should vastly change our priorities and attitudes. Our colleagues submit their work to journals and advisors; we, in addition, submit our work to God. Colossians 3:23 says, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.” What would it look like to write a research update for God? Could you give an honest and satisfying progress report on your work today, or this week, to the One who has called you to that work? Could I?
It seems to me that this approach to work fosters both humility and great encouragement. In contrast to so much of the academic life, which assumes that acceptance and respect are based on performance, we submit our work to God secure in the knowledge that our performance will never change his love for, or view of, us. We are therefore free from the need to sell our ideas more because they are ours than because they are right; from the desperate striving to write a paper that will prove our competence; from the insidious habit of comparing ourselves and our work to our peers. This is intellectual humility: we can celebrate our good ideas and academic successes without using them for our own glory, and celebrate others’ ideas and successes without jealousy. This is also great encouragement: we are free to love and enjoy learning for its own sake, and in so doing, love God with all of our minds.
This is the work we are called to do. We are called to seek God’s truth and God’s beauty in the truth and beauty of the works of His hands. We are called to express and deepen our love for God by loving the things God loves; by studying the people and the world that God has created; by helping them become more fully themselves. We are called to willing diligence, since we work not for ourselves or for our academic peers, but for God. We are called to humility and great encouragement, since God accepts our work as an offering of obedience and love.
We, in GCF, spend a good deal of time thinking about how to live the Christian life.
We care a lot about our individual spirituality. We wonder together about how we, personally and in light of our faith, should respond to the many injustices in the world. Recently, we talked about how we see God acting and showing grace in our individual lives.
And all of this matters, because we’re all individuals. But we’re also a community. And we’re connected to an even wider community. We call this the Church.
But sometimes the Church can feel like an altogether slow-moving, irrelevant, kind of frumpy behemoth.
In theory, Church people are our people, but how connected to them are we really?
This quarter we’re going to take time to think a little more communally. And we’re going think well about the Church proper—all of us and the all the rest—engaging with the world.
Because Christ died for the Church. And we all get the sense that, while we can do some things on our own, the church communal and worldwide is actually a force to be reckoned with.
And so we’re going to ask some questions..
What even is the Church?
How is the Church supposed to engage in the world?
What makes the Church distinct from any other social organization?
Why does the Church look so different in different places when we all hold to the same fundamental beliefs?
What actually unites us?
Thankfully, we won’t be making up answers to these questions. The Bible actually has lots to say to these questions and more. Let’s learn together.
This Spring Quarter. Thursday night. Chapel on the Ave. Be there.
Because you’ve been really busy and you’re tired and it’s hard to find time for anything, maybe especially prayer and Jesus and all that stuff that matters but doesn’t come with a hard and fast deadline…Join us for GCF’s spring retreat.
We’ll take a break and retreat into the things that matter most.
And we’ll be on an island. And there won’t be interwebs to distract us. And there will be good food to nourish us.
For a portion of our time, we’ll be discussing C.S. Lewis’ Learning in War-Time.
During this season of Lent we’ll consider the stories that occur just before Christ’s death on the cross: Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, before the court of the Sanhedrin, denied by his disciples, handed over to be crucified. They’re mysterious and dark stories. They’re the stories that leave us with lumps in our throats. They’re the ones we only want to hear once a year. Because we see much of ourselves in them.
Join us for the stories that lead into the story of God’s greatest grace of all.
Dinner is at 6.
Short stories from Scripture and small groups start at 7 in the Sanctuary of Chapel on the Ave.
My soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.
Call: Out of the depths I have cried to You. Response: O Lord, hear my voice.
Call: With my whole heart I want to praise You. Response: O Lord, hear my voice.
Call: If you, Lord, should mark iniquities: Response: Who could stand? who could stand? I will wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in His word do I hope.
Reflection on Ash Wednesday:
Two years ago, my grandfather died. And unbeknownst to the family, my grandmother carried his ashes around in her purse for over a year. She ended up carrying them with her all the way from Washington to the National Dairy Expo in Madison, WI, a destination to which both she and my grandfather had made an annual pilgrimage for decades. There, at the Expo, to her two daughters chagrin, my grandmother produced their father’s ashes in a Ziploc bag. She told them that she wanted to spread them on the shavings where the cows they loved walked.
My mother and aunt pleaded for a different place. One with fewer people, fewer animals. And I’m not sure how, but they won her over and they ended up in a local park.
With a few close, dairy farmer friends and her daughters by her side, my grandma set to spreading her husband’s ashes. I understand that, with plastic hotel cups, they each scooped out and scattered around a bit of Mike Lancaster. They did it carefully because it was windy. But my grandmother wasn’t as careful as the rest. When her turn finally came, she popped her cup of ashes up into the sky.
And like in a scene from a movie, the wind caught the ashes and it just covered all of them.
My aunt had just put on lip gloss and so found her lips coated with my Grandpa’s remains.
Ashes.
I hadn’t thought much about them until I heard that story. What would it be like to have the ashes of your father stuck to your lips and in your hair and on your clothes?
The thing is, there’s something just right about the whole image because the dead have a way of sticking to us…sticking to us in sometimes the most unpleasant of ways.
And this isn’t too far from the meaning of Ash Wednesday. On this day, the first day of the season of Lent, we’re reminded that death sticks with us, that it has from the beginning. We’re reminded of our mortality, our frailty, and that finality is all around us.
From dust you came and to dust you will return are the words spoken with the imposition of ashes.
They’re words from the curse God speaks in Genesis. It is to say, without pretense, this is the way it is: You are going to die. In this life, there is sadness and sorrow. There is sin and suffering. There is bleakness beyond what we can sometimes bear.
These are the sorts of truths that, like death, we’d rather bury than carry around with us in our purses.
But on Ash Wednesday and over the course of Lent we take these truths and put them front and center to remember. From dust you came and to dust you will return. Ashes in the shape of a cross. A symbol of death.
But also a symbol of hope, of life.
And this is Ash Wednesday too. For when remember the way things really are, we remember what we really need and we open ourselves up to the possibility of what’s really to come. We’re reminded of our need for and the hope of Easter, that day when death was conquered, and the curse was broken.
From dust you came and to dust you will return.
Prayer:
God, death is sticky. Sorrow is sticky. Ours sins are the stickiest. We cannot shake these realities that we loathe. And so today we face them for just a moment, trusting that, with your nearness, we might have the courage to live in reality.
And we confess that our reality is so often strange and disappointing.
It’s confusing that life is short and hard. It frustrating that so much of our time is spent on monotonous tasks.
We want life abundant and joy and peace that passes understanding, but we settle for the worst things; relationships that hold us down, jobs that don’t use our gifts, addictions to things that drain us of life, binges that waste our time.
Sometimes our minds get stuck on endless loops of self-loathing lies.
Today we recognize that in our reality we get stuck. Just stuck.
And so we pray for freedom. Freedom from ourselves and the lies we tell.
We pray for love. To give and to receive it.
We pray for understanding, that in this short life we might have enough of it to live meaningfully, to see beyond the minor things to the things that truly matter.
We pray that we might actually grow, more and more, into the people you’d have us be.
We pray that death and sorrow and sin—those things that stick to us and weigh us down would be overshadowed by a greater reality—a reality you offer should we choose to see you as present in this life. A reality where we are endlessly loved, where we are forgiven all the time, where we have reason to hope, even when we doubt. A reality where the hope of Easter is daily before us.
And we pray that in this Lenten season we might live a little more into this reality each day.
Blessing:
God go before you to lead you, God go behind you to protect you, God go beneath you to support you, God go beside you to befriend you. Do not be afraid. May the blessing of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit be upon you. Do not be afraid. Amen.
My soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.
Call: Out of the depths I have cried to You. Response: O Lord, hear my voice.
Call: With my whole heart I want to praise You. Response: O Lord, hear my voice.
Call: If you, Lord, should mark iniquities: Response: Who could stand? who could stand? I will wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in His word do I hope.
He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge. (Ps. 91:4, NRSV)
Children often have a unique sense of security in the nest — a sense that they are loved, protected, and perfectly safe. They know that somebody else is in charge, somebody big and strong and experienced. Adults no longer have this feeling, and we miss it.
We, too, need to be sheltered, warmed, embraced. Some of us aren’t sure what we’re doing in grad school or where we’re going with work. Some of us feel unspeakably alone. Others have been betrayed. Some have been staggered by a report that has just come back from a pathology lab. Some are simply high-tension human beings, strung tight as piano wire.
To all such folk, the psalmist speaks a word of comfort. It is one of the great themes of the Scriptures: God is our shelter. He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge.
The image here is of a bird that senses the approach of a predator and instinctively spreads out its wings like a canopy. Then the fledglings scuttle underneath for shelter. The point is that God is our shelter when the winds begin to howl; under God’s providence we are defended, protected, perfectly safe—someone else is in charge—someone big, strong, and experienced. God spreads his wings over us. It’s a picture that offers sublime comfort.
Still, a disturbing question pricks us. How true is the picture of a sheltering God? How secure are we in the nest?
We hear about ISIS and Boko Haram, about terrorist attacks and massacres in Nigeria, Israel, Syria, Iraq, Paris, Cameroon. Psalm 91 says, “I shall not fear the grenade that flies by day.” Could a believer say this in Syria?
Or we learn that a loved one has received a terrible diagnosis. The doctors talk about treatments and research and making her as comfortable as possible. But all we can think is that she will not see her children graduate or get married, that her parents will bury a child.
Whatever happened to the wings of God? Can you get brain cancer under those wings? Get molested by a family member? Can you find, suddenly one day, that everything in your life seems to be cascading out of control?
Psalm 91 says no evil shall befall us. How can we understand this when it sometimes seems like God has forsaken us? When we have cashed out some of the poetry and then added in the witness of the rest of Scripture, what we get, I believe, is the conclusion that no final evil shall befall us. We know that we can believe God with all our heart and yet have our heart broken. Everyone in the church knows this. And yet, generation after generation of bruised saints have known something else and spoken of it. In the mystery of faith, we find a hand on us in the darkness, a voice that calls our name, and the sheer certainty that nothing can ever separate us from the love of God—not for this life and not for the life to come.
We are like fledglings who scuttle under the wings of their parent. The forces of evil beat on those wings with everything they have. When it is finished, when evil has done its worst, those wings are all bloodied and busted and hanging at wrong angles. And in all the commotion, we too get roughed up quite a lot.
But we are all right, because those wings have never folded. They are spread out to be wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities. And when the feathers quit flying, we peep out and discover that we have been in the only place that was not leveled. This is the one who protects us from final evil, now and in the life to come—the life in which, at last, it is safe for God to fold his wings.
He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge. It’s not a simple truth, but it is the truth. And we ought to believe it with everything that is in us.
Prayer:
God, we seek refuge in you.
When we feel like we are not enough – not good enough or capable enough or confident enough or eloquent enough – remind us that your grace is sufficient, and that your power is made perfect in our weakness. And remind us that no matter how the world sees us, we are precious and honored and dearly beloved in your sight.
When we hear about great violence and sorrow in the world and in our communities and in our own lives, about broken relationships and disease and so many other things, stay near us. Remind us, when we are battered and bruised, that you speak even in the darkness.
Father, help us to trust. Thank you for giving yourself up for us; for loving us more than we can imagine; for spreading your wings to keep us safe through the storm. Thank you that you are in charge, and that under your care, we are protected. We love you. Amen.
Blessing:
God go before you to lead you, God go behind you to protect you, God go beneath you to support you, God go beside you to befriend you. Do not be afraid. May the blessing of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit be upon you. Do not be afraid. Amen.
The Grad and Faculty Lunch group is still in the process of selecting what book they’re going to read 
AND because not all reading over the summer needs to be academic and non-fiction, we invite everyone to read for the first time or re-read for the sixth time, Madeleine L’Engle’s, 
