Source: Wikimedia
STORY
As a church, we value Story. In other words, we seek to: know God’s story, discover our city’s story, find our part in The Story.
One of the reasons why Yahweh has given us so much story, so much narrative in Scripture, is because stories determine how we see ourselves, others and the world, and how we experience God.
Throw a rule book at people’s head, or offer them a list of doctrines, and they can duck or avoid it, or simply disagree and go away. Tell them a story though, and invite them into a community of people living by that story, and you invite them to step into a different world; you invite them to share an entire worldview. And when someone comes into the Gospel story and finds how compelling it is, it begins to quietly shatter the worldview that they were in already. There is no telling what can happen, when God himself breathes new lives and new worlds into being through his word. (N.T. Wright)
As the Author of Life, Jesus has included all of us into his grand narrative. Publicly reading Scripture allows us to understand our place in it as a community. It also wields power to challenge whatever preexisting stories we have about God, ourselves, and the world. Biblical narrative and poetry creates an active environment inside our imagination, shaping the very fabric of what we believe to be plausible!
With all this in mind, our teachings series will regularly walk through the overall narrative scope of the Bible, so that we know God’s story.
(See: How to Read the Bible, from the Bible Project; Reframe Course, by Regent College; Read the Bible for a Change, by Ray Lubeck)