One of the things that we used to do here at University Lutheran is produce a resource called “Living the Lectionary”. The idea was that it was to be a devotional/discipleship guide that members could bring home with them and use throughout the week as they considered the readings from that Sunday. After a while…
Every Sunday morning here at University Lutheran, we use four readings. One from the Old Testament (but not the Psalms), one from the Psalms, one from a New Testament letter, and one from a Gospel. All of those readings should usually form a cohesive theme, for example, last Sunday’s readings were mostly about talking to…
We’re starting a new newsletter series that we will call “Connecting the Dots,” all about the readings that we experience on a Sunday morning. Normally speaking here at University Lutheran we hear 4 specific readings every Sunday: The First Reading – Normally the Old Testament, although in Easter this reading comes from the Book of…
Perhaps the whole reason that we have the notion of a “Bible reading plan” is due to a man named Robert Murray M’Cheyne (sometimes spelled McCheyne). M’Cheyne was a Scottish Presbyterian minister who devised his personal reading plan in the mid 1800’s. The plan is actually two plans in one. There are two sets of…
If you flip open to the table of contents on your copy of the Bible, you may not realize at first that the listing there isn’t exactly “chronological”. Sure, it starts with Genesis (the beginning) and ends with Revelation (the end), but it goes through a couple loop-de-loops in between. Theses loops have to do…
There is something about having a great name, and this Bible reading plan has a GREAT NAME. The name of this plan is “the Bible Reading Plan for Shirkers and Slackers”. Rather than giving you a defined week by week set of readings, the plan simply separates the Bible into different days. So every Sunday…
For the next few weeks we are going to be reviewing different Bible reading plans to give you an introduction into some ways that you can start to read the Bible. Today we’re looking at “Reading the Word of God,” a Bible reading plan put together by three different Lutheran church bodies working together. You…
Recently, through the “Question of the Week” in our email newsletter, we found out that people wanted to grow most in the area of “understanding the Bible”. When we dug a little deeper, we found that this was coming from about three places: 1. “I feel like I don’t know where to start.” 2. “I…
Here’s your big word for the day, “Adiaphora”. “Adiaphora” literally means “it doesn’t make a difference”, and it is the Latin word used by the Lutheran Reformers to talk about things that don’t have a necessarily Biblical basis, but are a part of church practice. Confirmation is a good example of this. Nowhere in Scripture…
One of the aspects of worshiping at a liturgical church is that it has an ancient feel to it. That’s on purpose. Liturgical churches seek to connect the present day with the ancient reality of the faith. The sainted Robert Webber wrote a whole series of books on this topic called “Ancient-Future”. So our worship…