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Categories: Carillon Newsletter,News,Reflections

Pastor Matthew Emery

I simply want to take a moment or two here and invite you to consider taking part in a couple of things that will be happening on Wednesday nights in coming weeks:

Evening Prayer (Vespers)each Wednesday, 6:30 – 7:00 pm, on the Meeting House Chancel.  Continuing on from a pattern we started during the weeks of Advent, Pastor Nancy and I have decided to continue celebrating a service of Evening Prayer (also known as ‘vespers’) each week on Wednesday evening at 6:30.  These services are an approximately 25 to 30 minute pause each week to dwell in prayer, scripture, silence, and (usually) a bit of song. 

                You’ll start to notice more and more things around the life of our congregation—such as meetings and adult faith formation offerings—being scheduled for 7:00 pm on Wednesday evenings.  The Evening Prayer services are a great way to come a little early to pause, re-center, and pray.  Or, just come for the service itself, regardless of whether you’re staying for something that begins at 7:00 pm.

Discipleship, with Dietrich Bonhoeffer Wednesdays at 7:00 pm:  2/6, 2/20, 2/27, 3/20, 3/27, 4/3, and 4/17.  We’re getting a little bit of an “early” start on one of the adult formation offerings that will continue through the season of Lent.  Over seven sessions, we’ll journey together through Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous book Discipleship (also known, in an earlier translation, as The Cost of Discipleship). 

“Like ravens we have gathered around the carcass of cheap grace. 
From it we have imbibed the poison which has killed the following of Jesus among us.”

“Whenever Christ calls us, his call leads us to death.”

This seminal work, written in the late 1930’s, is a classic exposition of what it means to follow Christ in a modern world.  It represents Bonhoeffer’s critique of popular Christianity in Germany under the growing influence of the Nationalist Sociality Party. His views put him in the minority within the German church and placed him at odds with the political system.  For where the ethical work of the church had increasingly become the justification of, and conformation to, nationalist policies and the broader German culture, “for Bonhoeffer, the primary challenge of ethical thinking

[was]

how to conform one’s life to the teaching of Jesus and the patterns of his life lived in obedience to his father’s will.” Bonhoeffer’s writing is deeply rooted in the context of his time and his country, and yet it remains fresh and pertinent to us, three-quarters of a century later. Wherever the church is found, it is challenged by the human tendency to seek the path of least resistance, and must make a choice. It will either choose the tempting and easy path of becoming a church of the world, a church that embraces the world and its ways. Or it will choose the difficult path of becoming Christ’s church, a church that embraces Christ and pursues after Christ. This was true in the year 500, in the year 1937, and in the year 2019.

Bonhoeffer’s writing is deep, poignant, and intellectually challenging.  This won’t be exactly an “entry level” read for many.  And yet, it is worth the investment to chew on and savor.  That’s why we’re spreading this series out over this many weeks, with some weeks off in between some of the sessions, to give participants the opportunity to fully dive in. 

For this series, I’ll have available for purchase or borrowing copies of Discipleship from the most recent English edition, that of the critically-acclaimed Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works series.  If you have a copy of the older translation, which was issued under the title The Cost of Discipleship, you’re welcome to use that too.

Please do consider joining in this substantive and soul-searching delve into Bonhoeffer’s most well-known work.  And, if you do decide to join us, an RSVP is always appreciated (especially since I’m ordering the copies of the new translation):  email me at matt@storrscongchurch.org.

Yours in the journey,

Matt

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