Advent 5 - Christmas as New Creation (John 1:1-18)

• Advent 5 - Christmas as New Creation (John 1:1-18) - Christian Cryder
  (Click here for download instructions)

Advent 4 - Christmas as News (Lk 2:1-21)

• Advent 4 - Christmas as News (Lk 2:1-21) - Ryan Sutherland
  (Click here for download instructions)

Advent 3 - God's Response to Our Doubts (Lk 1:57-80)

• Advent 3 - God's Response to Our Doubts (Lk 1:57-80) - Christian Cryder
  (Click here for download instructions)

All Souls Christmas Party

Hey folks, we're throwing our 3rd annual All Souls Christmas Party!

Here's the scoop... it's this Friday Dec 11, from 7 PM - Midnight @ the Cryder place (2307 River Road - look for the mailbox and turn down the alley - there's parking on River Road or Luella Lane).

We'll have amazing Italian food, great wine and beer, with plenty of interesting people and stimulating conversation! Anyone is welcome - whether you've known us for a long time, or you'd simply like to get to know us better - we'd love to have you join us.

Kids are welcome, and so are your friends! Just RSVP if you're coming, so we know how much food to prepare! No matter how cold it gets outside, it'll be a warm and toasty evening in our home! We hope you'll come celebrate the Christmas season with us!

Advent 2 - A God of the Impossible (Lk 1:5-55)

• Advent 2 - A God of the Impossible (Lk 1:5-55) - Christian Cryder
  (Click here for download instructions)

Advent 1 - The Hope of Emmanuel (Mt 1_18-25)

• Advent 1 - The Hope of Emmanuel (Mt 1_18-25) - Ryan Sutherland
  (Click here for download instructions)

Guideposts to the Kingdom (Acts 8:26-40)

• Guideposts to the Kingdom (Acts 8:26-40) - Christian Cryder
  (Click here for download instructions)

How the Kingdom Grows (Acts 8:1-25)

• How the Kingdom Grows (Acts 8:1-25) - Ryan Sutherland
  (Click here for download instructions)

How the Gospel Answers Religion's Challenge (Acts 7:1-60)

• How the Gospel Answers Religion's Challenge (Acts 7:1-60) - Christian Cryder
  (Click here for download instructions)

How the Kingdom Challenges Religion (Acts 6:7 - 7:1)

• How the Kingdom Challenges Religion (Acts 6:7 - 7:1) - Christian Cryder
  (Click here for download instructions)

All Hallows Eve Party!

"It was a dark and scary night...." - Let's hope so! Join us this Friday, Oct 30 (the night BEFORE Halloween) from 7 PM till midnight for our first ever All Hallows Eve Party! We're making homemade pizzas with 5 gallons of Beau's special "All Missoula Hops Ale." Plus we're doing COSTUMES - so you've got an excuse for dressing up if you want!

WHERE: The Cryder place @ 2307 River Road (look for the mailbox and turn down the alley)

WHAT TO BRING: We always welcome extra wine or beer (or your favorite nonalchoholic beverage) -AND- we need people to bring your best carved pumpkins.

The party will be indoors, but we'll set the pumpkins out on the back deck and light a roaring fire (Christian's famous for roaring fires). So if you want to hang out around the fire, you might want to bring a jacket in case it's chilly!

As always, everyone is welcome - kids, friends, distant relatives, everyone!

Please RSVP if you're coming so we know how much food to prepare. Questions: contact Christian (529-5568) or Ryan (529-2468). Hope to see you on Friday night!

Service in the Kingdom (Acts 6:1-8)

• Service in the Kingdom (Acts 6:1-8) - Christian Cryder
  (Click here for download instructions)

Fear Inside the Kingdom (Acts 5:11-42)

• Fear Inside the Kingdom (Acts 5:11-42) - Ryan Sutherland
  (Click here for download instructions)

A Death Knell in the Kingdom (Acts 4:32 - 5:11)

Who does God think he is? In Acts chapter 5, we see him striking two of his own people DEAD simply for telling a LIE (one that didn't even hurt anyone, no less)!

• How on earth can something like this be in the Bible?
  
• Shouldn't we repudiate this kind of behavior?
  
• And how could Jesus possibly be a "good teacher" if he tells us to worship this God and pray "thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven"? Really?!?!
• If this is the Christian God, how could he possibly be worth serving?
  

Those are great questions! Join us as we wrestle with them in today's message...

• A Death Knell in the Kingdom (Acts 4:32 - 5:11) - Christian Cryder
  (Click here for download instructions)

The Fear of the Lord

An excerpt, mentioned in a sermon recently, taken from Eugene Peterson's Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places (pgs. 40-44)...

Most of us have a sense that somehow or other we need to get in on what God is doing: we want to be involved. We want to do something. But what, without getting in the way, without gumming up the works?

The biblical word of choice for the term we need is "fear-of-the-Lord." None of the available synonyms in the English language – awe, reverence, worshipful respect – seems quite adequate. They miss the punch delivered by “fear-of-the-Lord.” ...

The primary way in which we cultivate fear-of-the-Lord is in prayer and worship – personal prayer and corporate worship. We deliberately interrupt our preoccupation with ourselves and attend to God, place ourselves intentionally in sacred space, in sacred time, in the holy presence – and wait. We become silent and still in order to listen and respond to what is Other than us. Once we get the hang of this we find that this can occur any place and any time. But prayer and worship provide the base.

“Fear-of-the-Lord” is the best term we have to point to this way of life we cultivate as Christians. The Christian life consists mostly of what God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – is and does. But we also are part of it. Not the largest part, but still part. A world has been opened up to us by revelation in which we find ourselves walking on holy ground and living in sacred time. The moment we realize this, we feel shy, cautious. We slow down, we look around, ears and eyes alert. Like lost children happening on a clearing in the woods and finding elves and fairies singing and dancing in a circle around a prancing two-foot-high unicorn, we stop in awed silence to accommodate to this wonderful but unguessed-at revelation. But for us, it isn't a unicorn and elves; it it Sinai and Tabor and Golgotha.

The moment we find ourselves unexpectedly in the presence of the sacred, our first response is to stop in silence. We do nothing. We say nothing. We fear to trespass inadvertently; we are afraid of saying something inappropriate. Plunged into mystery we become still, we fall silent, all our senses alert. This is the fear-of-the-Lord.

Or we don't. Uneasy with the unknown, again like children, we run around crazily, yelling and screaming, trying to put our stamp of familiarity on it. We attempt to get rid of the mystery by making our presence large and noisy. There is something about the sacred that makes us uneasy. We don't like being in the dark, not knowing what to do. And so we attempt to domesticate the mystery, explain it, probe it, name and use it. Uncomfortable with the mystery, we try to banish it with cliches. But until we know what is going on, anything we say or do is apt to be wrong, or at least inappropriate.

We all have experiences of finding ourselves in the sacred presence or on holy ground from time to time, however briefly. The most common of such experiences is being in the presence of a newborn child. Most of us are speechless and still. We don't know what to do or say. We are overtaken by the mystery of God-given life. Something deep within us responds to the sacredness of life, of sheer existence; our response becomes worship, adoration, prayer, awe – the fear-of-the-Lord.

But there is also something in the sacred that makes us uneasy. We don't like being in the dark, not knowing what to do. And so we attempt to domesticate the mystery, explain it, probe it, name and use it. “Blasphemy” is the term we use for these verbal transgressions of the sacred, these violations of the holy: taking God's name in vain, dishonoring sacred time and place, reducing God to gossip and chatter. Uncomfortable with the mystery, we try to banish it with cliches.

Every culture has stories and taboos to train and discipline its people in protecting and honoring the sacred mystery. Human beings are not gods; the moment we forget this, we violate the boundaries of our humanity and something is violated in reality itself. The universe suffers damage.

So we set out to cultivate the fear-of-the-Lord, “the quintessential rubric, which expresses in a nutshell the basic grammar that holds the covenant community together,” as Bruce Waltke puts it. Despite its prominence in the Bible, the term does not find wide use among North American Christians. “Fear” apparently gets us off on the wrong foot. Grammarians help us regain our biblical stride by calling our attention to the fact that fear-of-the-Lord is a “bound phrase” (syntagm). The four words in English (two in Hebrew) are bound together, making a single word. Its function as a single word cannot be understood by taking it apart and then adding up the meanings of the parts. Fear-of-the-Lord is a word all its own. So we don't look up “fear” in the dictionary, then “God,” and then proceed to combine the two meanings: “Fear,” a feeling of apprehension, plus “God,” a divine being worthy of worship, is not fear-of-the-Lord. Pursuing that analytical route gets us way off the track.

But when we let the biblical contexts provide the conditions for understanding the word, we find that it means something more like a way of life in which human feelings and behavior are fused with God's being and revelation. There are upward of 138 occurrences of the term in a wide range of Old Testament books but most prominently in Proverbs, Psalms, Isaiah, Chronicles, and Deuteronomy. God is active in the term; the human is active in the term. “Fear-of-the-Lord” designates a way of living that cannot be dissected into two parts, any more than a baby can be dissected into what comes from sperm and what come from egg. “Fear-of-the-Lord” is a new word in our vocabularies; it marks the way of life appropriate to our creation and salvation and blessing by God.

A common and distressingly frequent way of answering the question, "So now, what do we do?" but one that avoids prayerful involvement with God in the presence of God, is to come up with a Code of Conduct. The Ten Commandments is the usual place to start, supplemented by Proverbs, brought to a focus by Jesus' summing up (Love God/Love your neighbor), salted by the Golden Rule, then capped off by the Beatitudes. That might seem the simplest way to go about it, but religious communities that take this route have rarely, if ever, been able to let it go at that. They commonly find that the particular context in which they live requires special handling: rules are added, regulations enforced, and it isn't long before the Code of Conduct grows into a formidable jungle of talmudic regulation.

The other and opposite way of doing the Code of Conduct thing is to make it as simple as possible; get it down to the bare bones of bumper sticker spirituality: “Follow your bliss... Smell the roses... Do no harm...” My favorite is the fragment of a poem sometimes attributed to W. H. Auden:

I love to sin; God loves to forgive.
The world is admirably arranged.

But the fundamental inadequacy of codes of conduct for giving direction in how to live the spiritual life is that they put us in charge (or, which is just as bad, put someone else in charge of us); God is moved off the field of action to the judge's stand where he grades our performance. The moment that we take charge, “knowing good and evil,” we are in trouble and almost immediately start getting other people in trouble too.

No. However useful codes of conduct are in the overall scheme of things, they are not the place to begin answering the question, “Now, what do we do?”

The fact that fear-of-the-Lord cannot be precisely defined is one of its glories – we are dealing with something that we cannot pin down, we inhabit mystery, we can't be cocksure about anything, we cultivate an attentive and reverent expectation before every person, event, rock, and tree. Presumption recedes, attentiveness increases, expectancy heightens.

Fear-of-the-Lord, as we notice the way our biblical writers use it, turns out to be a term that is plain without being reductive, clear without being over-simplified, and accurate without dissolving the mystery inherent in all dealings with God and his world. It also has the considerable advantage of evading the precise definition or "control" that we could use to locate ourselves along a spectrum of piety or goodness that would feed our instincts for coziness with God.

So what do we do, given our launch into this life of following Jesus? “Fear the Lord, you his saints” (Ps 34:9 RSV). Fear-of-the-Lord is not studying about God but living in reverence before God. We don't so much lack knowledge, we lack reverence. Fear-of-the-Lord is not a technique for acquiring spiritual know-how but a willed not-knowing. It is not so much know-how we lack; we lack a simple being-there. Fear-of-the-Lord, nurtured in worship and prayer, silence and quiet, love and sacrifice, turns everything we do into a life of "breathing God."

The Missional Nature of Encounter (Isaiah 6:1-13)

• The Missional Nature of Encounter (Isaiah 6:1-13) - Ryan Sutherland
  (Click here for download instructions)

The Crux of the Kingdom (Acts 4:1-22)

• The Crux of the Kingdom (Acts 4:1-22) - Christian Cryder
  (Click here for download instructions)

The Threat of the Kingdom (Acts 3:1-23)

• The Threat of the Kingdom (Acts 3:1-23) - Ryan Sutherland
  (Click here for download instructions)

The Radical Otherness of the Kingdom (Acts 2:42-47)

• The Radical Otherness of the Kingdom (Acts 2:42-47) - Christian Cryder
  (Click here for download instructions)

The Four Pillars of the Church (Acts 2:42-47)

• The Four Pillars of the Church (Acts 2:42-47) - Christian Cryder
  (Click here for download instructions)

All Souls Birthday Service

Just a quick reminder - we're celebrating our first year as a new church for Missoula, and we'd love to have you come join us for a special worship service this Sunday, September 6 @ 10 AM on the lawn at the Holiday Inn Downtown (if it rains, we'll move inside).

See you tomorrow! (Next week, we'll be back at our regular location in MCT!)

A Simple Solution to a Complicated Problem

• Repentance 1: A Simple Solution to a Complicated Problem (Mark 1:14-15) - Ryan Sutherland
  (Click here for download instructions)

The Problem of Evil (Eccl 8:9 - 9:1)

• The Problem of Evil (Ecclesiastes 8:9 - 9:1) - Bryan Clark
  (Click here for download instructions)

Beat the Heat Party

It's official! We're throwing a Beat the Heat Party! Scrumptious hawaiian-burgers hot off the grill, plenty of great beer and wine to wash it all down, with live bluegrass-honkytonk courtesy Cash for Junkers. Wow. It should be a fabulous night!

Of course it'll be even better if you join us. Here's the skinny:

• WHEN: Friday, July 31, from 7 PM til Midnight (or when everyone leaves)
  
• WHERE: Christian & Marilyn's place (2307 River Road - look for the mailbox and turn down the alley. Parking on River Road or Luella Lane.)
  
• WHAT TO BRING: A six pack of great beer, a bottle of fine wine, or a beverage of your choice! We'll provide the rest!
  

If you've never been to an All Souls party, here's your chance to see what you've been missing. These are family friendly affairs - and you're welcome to invite your friends!

On this particular occasion, you may want to bring along a couple of lawn chairs as well. Please RSVP if you're in so we can have an idea how much food to prepare!

The Prodigal Sons (Luke 15:11-32) - Part 2

• The Prodigal Sons (Luke 15:11-32) -Part 2 - Christian Cryder
  Click here for download instructions)

Too Great to Live Small (Jonah 4)

• Too Great to Live Small (Jonah 4) - Jason Barrie
  (Click here for download instructions)

The Prodigal Sons (Luke 15:11-32) - Part 1

• The Prodigal Sons (Luke 15:11-32) -Part 1 - Christian Cryder
  Click here for download instructions)

A Glimpse of the Kingdom (Acts 2:42-47)

• A Glimpse of the Kingdom (Acts 2:42-47) - Christian Cryder
  Click here for download instructions)

The Gateway to the Kingdom (Acts 2:22-41)

• The Gateway to the Kingdom (Acts 2:22-41) - Christian Cryder
  Click here for download instructions)

Masters of Imagination

When we think of imagination, we often think of what is not real. This is not necessarily correct. Here is a quote from Eugene Peterson's Subversive Spirituality where he suggests that a robust imagination is absolutely essential for anyone who would follow Jesus:

Thirteen four-year-old children sat on carpet of the sanctuary at the chancel steps on a Thursday morning in late February. I sat with them, holding cupped in my hands a last season's birdnest. We talked about the birds on their way back to build nests like this one and the spring that was about to burst in on us. The children were rapt their attention.

I love doing this, meeting with the children, telling them stories, singing songs with them, telling them that God lives them, praying with them. I do it frequently. They attend our church's nursery school and come into the sanctuary with their teachers every couple of weeks to meet with me. They are so alive, their capacity for wonder endless, their imaginations lithe and limber.

Winter was receding and spring was arriving, although not quite arrived. But there were signs. It was the signs that I was talking about. The birdnest to begin with. It was visibly weedy and grey and dirty, but as we looked at it we saw the invisible - warblers on their way north from wintering grounds in South America, pastel and spotted eggs in the nest. We counted the birds in the sky over Florida, over North Carolina, over Virginia.

We looked through the walls of the church to the warming ground. We looked beneath the surface and saw the earthworms turning somersaults. We began to see shoots of color break through the ground, crocus and tulip and grape hyacinth. The buds on the trees and shrubs were swelling and about to burst into flower and we were remembering and anticipating and counting the colors.

I never get used to these Maryland springs and every time am taken by surprise all over again. I grew up in northern Montana where the trees are the same color all year long and spring is mostly mud. The riotous color in blossom and bloom in Maryland's dogwood and forsythia, redbud and shadbush, catches me unprepared. But this year I was getting prepared and getting the children prepared for all the glorious gifts that were going to be showering in on us in a week or so. We were looking at the bare birdnest and seeing the colors, hearing the songs, smelling the blossoms.

There are moments in this kind of work when you know you are doing it right. This was one of those moments. The children's faces were absolutely concentrated. We had slipped through a time warp and were experiencing the full sensuality of the Maryland spring.

They were no longer looking at the birdnest, they were seeing migrating birds and hatching chicks, garlanded trees and dewy blossoms. Then, abruptly, at the center of this moment of high holiness, Bruce said, "Why don't you have any hair on your head?"

Why didn't Bruce see what the rest of us were seeing - the exuberance, the fecundity? Why hadn't he made the transition to "seeing the invisible" that were were engrossed in? All he saw was the visible patch of baldness on my head, a rather uninteresting fact, while the rest of us were seeing multi-dimensioned thruths. Only four years old and already Bruce's imagination was crippled.

Imagination is the capacity to make connections between the visible and the invisible, between heaven and earth, between present and past, between present and future. For Christians, whose largest investment is in the invisible, the imagination is indispensable, for it is only by means of the imagination that we can see reality whole, in context. "What imagination does with reality is the reality we live by," writes David Ignatow in Open Between Us.

When I look at a tree, most of what I "see" I do not see at all. I see a root system beneath the surface, sending tendrils through the soil, sucking up nutrients out of the loam. I see the light pouring energy into the leaves. I see the fruit that will appear in a few months. I stare and stare and see the bare branches austere in next winter's snow and wind. I see all that, I really do - I am not making it up. But I could not photograph it. I see it by means of imagination. If my imagination is stunned or inactive, I will only see what I can use, or something that is in my way.

Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel prize-winning poet, with a passion for Christ supported and deepened by his imagination, said in an interview in The New York Times Review of Books that the minds of Americans have been dangerously diluted by the rationalism of explanation. He is convinced that our imagination-deficient educational process has left us with a naive picture of the world. In this naive view, the universe has space and time - and nothing else. No values. No God. "Functionally speaking, men and women are not that different from a virus or bacteria, a speck in the universe."

Milosz sees the imagination, and especially the religious imagination which is the developed capacity to be in reverence before whatever confronts us, to be the shaping force of the world we really live in. "Imagination" he said, "can fashion the world into a homeland as well as into a prison or a place of battle. Nobody lives in the 'objective' world, only in a world filtered through the imagination."

The imagination is among the chief glories of the human. When it is healthy and energetic, it ushers us into adoration and wonder, into the mysteries of God. When it is neurotic and sluggish, it turns people, millions of them, into parasites, copycats, and couch potatoes. The American imagination today is distressingly sluggish. Most of what is served up to us as the fruits of imagination is, in fact, the debasing of it into soap opera and pornography.

Right now, one of the essential Christian ministries in and to our ruined world is the recovery and exercise of the imagination. Ages of faith have always been ages rich in imagination. It is easy to see why: the materiality of the gospel (the seen, heard, and touched Jesus) is no less impressive than its spirituality (faith, hope, and love). Imagination is the mental tool we have for connecting material and spiritual, visible and invisible, earth and heaven.

We have a pair of mental operations, imagination and explanation, designed to work in tandem. When the gospel is given robust and healthy expression, the two work in graceful synchronicity. Explanation pins things down so that we can handle and use them - obey and teach, help and guide. Imagination opens things up so that we can grown into maturity - worship and adore, exclaim and honor, follow and trust. Explanation restricts and defines and holds down; imagination expands and lets loose. Explanation keeps our feet on the ground; imagination lifts our heads into the clouds. Explanation puts us in harness; imagination catapults us into mystery. Explanation reduces life to what can be used; imagination enlarges life into what can be adored.

But our technological and information-obsessed age has cut imagination from the team. In the life of the gospel, where everything originates and depends upon what we cannot see and is worked out in what we can see, imagination and explanation cannot get along without each other. Is it time to get aggressive? Is it time for the Christian community to recognize and honor and commission masters of the imagination - our poets and singers and storytellers-as partners in evangelical witness?

How else is Bruce going to hear the gospel when he grows up? How will he hear Isaiah's poetry, Jesus' parables, John's visions? It will be sad if, when he is 40 years old and enters a congregation of worshiping Christians and ministering angels, all he sees is a preacher's bald head.

A professor friend of mine summarized it like this: "Imagination is not the ability to conjure up what is unreal - rather, it is the ability to see what is real but unseen."

Christianity insists that the work of God - and thus of Christ, who is making all things new - is spiritual, and what is spiritual is unseen, apprehended only by faith. This does not mean that it's not real; it does mean that we need to learn how to see it.

We need to be masters of imagination, not of our own making, but of God's. We need to learn to imagine reality as he describes it for us.

The Spirit of the Kingdom (Acts 2:1-21)

• The Spirit of the Kingdom (Acts 2:1-21) - Ryan Sutherland
  (Click here for download instructions)

The Kingdom & Treachery (Acts 1:15-26)

• The Kingdom & Treachery (Acts 1:15-26) - Christian Cryder
  (Click here for download instructions)

Explorers Groups

Let's face it: most of us have questions about faith and spirituality. Often times, our friends don't really want to talk about these things, and churches seem to look down on people expressing their doubts and struggles. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a safe place to figure out what you think about God, regardless of what you conclude?

Introducing Explorers - a group for skeptics, doubters, and people with questions to take a fresh look at the biblical Jesus. If we're honest, that includes all of us.

So Explorers is a place for unbelievers, and for the unbeliever in all of us. It's a place where you can be honest about what you think, and get honest answers about the Christian faith. It's a place where you can make up your own mind about historic Christianity, by looking at the sources, rather than settling for second hand opinions.

Fundamentally, Explorers is all about working on our spirituality in community. It's a place where you can be yourself - have a beer, share a meal, wrestle with your faith, as friends rather than foes. We meet on a weekly basis to build meaningful relationships and figure out what we think about the Jesus of Scripture.

We offer a couple of different variations:

1. Explorers 1 (Who Is Jesus?) - The purpose of this group is to help people take a fresh look at the person, work, and claims of Jesus, from the perspective of classic Christianity. In 7 weeks you'll study an entire book of the Bible - the Gospel of Mark. You won't be asked to sing, pray, or do anything that would make you feel uncomfortable. You can come as you are; you can say as little or as much as you like. No one's going to nag you, try to convert you, or ask you for money. Our job is simply to help you figure out what you think about the Jesus of Scripture.
   
   
2. Explorers 2 (Doubts about God) - This group considers a lot of common doubts about God: How can there be one true religion? Hasn't science disproved Christianity? How could a loving God send people to hell? Great questions like these deserve thoughtful answers, and one of the best tools we've found to help us work through them is Tim Keller's Reason For God. We structure this as a weekly book group. If you wonder if it's possible to believe in the Christian God without turning off your brain, this might be just the group for you.
   
   
3. Explorers 3 (The Freedom of Grace) - This group considers one of the great claims of Christianity - that when we really encounter Christ (as a real, live person), we actually experience tremendous liberation and freedom. Conversely, we explore how approaching God impersonally - through religious performance or moral effort - can lead us to miss God altogether and experience tremendous bondage. Our guide for the journey? St. Paul and his letter to the Galatians.
   
   
4. Explorers 4 (The Bondage of Idolatry) - Our newest group, coming in Spring 2010. We'll be reading and discussing Tim Keller's Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power and the Only Hope That Matters. While many of us think that idols are a bygone relic of primitive cultures, Jesus claims that idolatry is alive and well within our hearts. If you find yourself wondering why you do the things you do - and why it's so hard to change - this book is for you!
   

All of these groups are dedicated to helping you figure out for yourself what YOU believe (and why!). Our aim is never to proselytize or convert (we don't think we can). Instead, we desire to be a resource, to honestly answer any question you want to ask, even if it leads you to reject the very Jesus we embrace.

Our goal is to give people like you the data you need to draw intelligent conclusions about one of the most influential figures in human history. And we think the best place to develop thoughtful opinions about Christ and Christianity is in a community of friends.

Sound interesting? We think so. And we'd love to have you join us. For more information, browse the FAQ or contact us. We look forward to seeing you soon...

The Coming of the Kingdom (Acts 1:1-11)

After working through the Gospel of John (focusing on Jesus), we're now beginning a series that will work through the book of Acts (focusing on the Church). This message is the introduction to that series...

• The Coming of the Kingdom (Acts 1:1-11) - Christian Cryder
  (Click here for download instructions)

Spiritual Breakthroughs (Part 2) (John 21:1-19)

• Spiritual Breakthroughs (Part 2) - Seeing the Church as Good News - Christian Cryder
  (Click here for download instructions)
  

Lessons on Faith in Brokenness (Mark 5:21-43)

• Lessons on Faith from a Broken Woman and a Broken Girl - Shane Sunn
  (Click here for download instructions)
  

(Shane Sunn is a good friend and mentor who has deeply influenced us in our ministry. Shane is currently planting his third PCA church: St. Patrick's Presbyterian, located in Greeley Colorado.)

Cinco de Mayo

It's that time of the year again! Good 'ol Pancho and his sidekick Villa will be helping us throw a killer Cinco de Mayo party this Friday, May 8 (so yes, it's technically an "Ocho de Mayo" party - we're sure you'll get over it after a couple of margaritas).

WHEN: Friday, May 8, from 7 PM until everyone goes home
WHERE: @ the Sutherland's place (1601 W Kent - holler for directions)
WHAT TO BRING: a hearty appetite and your favorite Mexican beverages

Please RSVP if you're coming (so we know how much food to prepare). Friends are welcome, and so are kids (but if you plan on staying late, you may want to get a sitter).

See you soon!
Christian & Ryan

Spiritual Breakthroughs (Part I) (John 21:1-19)

• Spiritual Breakthroughs (Part 1) - Seeing the Gospel as Good News - Christian Cryder
  (Click here for download instructions)

Sermons - Download Instructions

Ok, so you're staring at a sermon link, wondering what to do next. The link points to an MP3 file. If you simply click the link, it will probably start playing directly in your browser. This is just the way browsers work. If you want to download the MP3 to your local machine, follow the directions below for your operating system and web browser.

If you are using Windows:

• Hold your cursor over the above "Download: ..." link. (The link should contain the name of the sermon.)
• In Internet Explorer, right click the link and select "Save Target As..." from the menu.
• In Firefox, right click the link and select "Save Link As..." from the menu.
• In the dialog box that pops up, choose where you would like to save the MP3 file on your computer.

If you are using a Mac:

• Hold your cursor over the above "Download: ..." link. (The link should contain the name of the sermon.)
• In Safari, Press and hold the Ctrl key on your keyboard and click the link. Select "Download Linked File" from the menu.
• In Firefox, Press and hold the Ctrl key on your keyboard and click the link. Select "Save Link As..." from the menu.
• In the dialog box that pops up, choose where you would like to save the MP3 file on your computer.

If you are using Linux:

• Hold your cursor over the above "Download: ..." link. (The link should contain the name of the sermon.)
• In Firefox, right click the link and select "Save Link As..." from the menu.
• In the dialog box that pops up, choose where you would like to save the MP3 file on your computer.

All Souls Easter

Easter Sunrise

For the past two millennium, a curious set of folks from all walks of life have radically reoriented their lives around this particular Sunday. What's the big deal?

Here's a chance to find out for yourself. We invite you to join us this Easter season - to reflect, to celebrate, and maybe even to worship. Whether you are a follower of Jesus, or someone who's simply curious, we'd love to have you explore faith with us. This is a great opportunity to get to the heart of the mystery.

Here's what's happening:

• Good Friday service (celebrating Christ's brutal death on a Roman cross) - 7 PM on Friday evening at Christian & Marilyn Cryder's place (2307 River Road). Coffee and dessert afterwards.
  
  
• Easter Sunday service (celebrating Christ's unexpected resurrection) - 10 AM on Sunday morning at the Missoula Children's Theater. There will be a potluck lunch afterwards at Christian & Marilyn's place (see above).

We hope you will join us!

A Party For St. Patrick

Admit it: there's times you wish you were Irish. But you're not (and hey, you probably wouldn't like haggis anyway). So cheer up and make the best of it - come hoist a pint with us in honor of St. Patrick as we make fish & chips on the deck together.

It'll be a rousing good time - a roaring fire, great food & drink, and plenty of interesting friends (assuming you show up, of course). Who knows, there might even be some live music if folks bring their instruments. Sound interesting? Here's the skinny:

WHEN: Friday, March 13, from 7 PM until the leprechauns get sleepy
WHERE: @ the Cryder's place (2307 River Road - holler for directions)
WHAT TO BRING: a healthy appetite, a hearty thirst, and your favorite beer, wine, or scotch to share with friends. (If you like fine cigars around the fire, be sure to bring 'em with you.)

Please RSVP if you're coming (so we know how much food to prepare). Friends are welcome, and so are kids (but if you plan on staying late, you may want to get a sitter).

See you soon!
Christian & Ryan

New Time & Place

Hey folks! As many of you know, we've been forced to find a new place to worship.

This coming Sunday (Mar 8), All Souls Worship will happen @ 10 AM in Room 307 of the Missoula Children's Theater (200 N. Adams St.). It's on the 3rd floor, please enter from Main Street on the south side of the building.

We realize the new time and location will take some getting used to. That said, we also believe that God does these things for a reason, and we look forward to seeing how he grows us as a church during this time of transition. Please join us this Sunday as we make our move, and please help us spread the word to anyone you know who might be interested in attending (we don't have email addrs for everyone).

Also, remember to set your clocks ahead an hour on Saturday night as we spring forward for daylight savings. (Don't worry, we'll make coffee on Sunday morning!).

See you soon!
Christian

Reason For God Reading Group

Faith. Doubt. Belief. Skepticism.

What if there was a place that encouraged you not only to question your faith, but also to doubt your doubts? What if Christians and skeptics could sit down together, as friends, to look at the convictions behind both faith and doubt?

Tim Keller's The Reason for God is one of the best vehicles we've seen to foster this kind of conversation, so we're organizing a reading group for skeptics and believers alike.

• the group begins in February and is open to anyone with questions or doubts about the Christian faith.
• we'll meet regularly as friends to wrestle with Keller's ideas over lunch and beer - to see about what resonates (and what doesn't!), to thoughtfully examine our beliefs (and our doubts!).
  
• the purpose is not to "convert" anyone (we don't think we can). Rather, it's to create a safe place for people to process their faith and their doubts in community.
• the group will be co-led by Christian Cryder (an All Souls pastor who's been deeply influenced by Keller), and Jori Frakie (a good friend and thoughtful skeptic who loves Keller's book but isn't persuaded by it).
  

We think it's going to be fun, and we'd love to have you join us! If this sounds interesting, contact Christian (529-5568) or Jori (721-4148) for details.

About Tim Keller

As the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in downtown New York City, Tim Keller has spent years interacting with some of the most thoughtful, intelligent skeptics on the face of the planet. Amazingly, many of them now attend his church.

Whereas many Christian authors end up preaching to the choir, Keller writes for unbelievers and the Christians who love them. He believes that dialog "across party lines" is tremendously valuable - both for those who believe (that they might better examine their faith), as well as those who don't (that they might better examine their doubts).

In other words, Keller thinks we actually need friends who think differently than we do, to help us see things about our beliefs (or unbelief!) that we might miss on our own. Here at All Souls, this is the kind of community we are seeking to create. Maybe you can help us?

Slumdog Millionaire

This Friday evening we'll be meeting at the Wilma @ 6:45 PM to watch Slumdog Millionaire. Afterwards, we'll head next door to El Cazador for drinks and discussion. We do this because we believe that culture matters, and one of the best ways to engage our culture is to spend an evening with friends watching & discussing great movies.

If you'd like to attend, please contact us so we know how many seats to save.

Explorers 1 - Can We Trust Scripture?

Thanks to those of you who joined us for the first Explorers Group this past week. For those of you who couldn't make it, here's a summary of what we talked about.

Introduction

First of all, what is this "Explorers Group" thing about? Well, it's a place for skeptics, doubters, and people with questions (which if we're honest, includes all of us) to take a fresh look at Jesus. And it's a place where any question is fair game. So the way we want to start is by asking ourselves a couple of questions...

1. Q1: If you could ask God one question, and were guaranteed of getting an answer, what would you ask? (Don't worry about whether God actually exists at this juncture - just focus on the question you'd like to ask if he/she/it actually does. The point is to think about what really big question you'd like cleared up. What would it be? Got it yet? Ok, now go on to Q2 below...)
   
   
2. Q2: Now ask yourself, if God actually answered, what would it take for you to believe it was actually him speaking? (Think about that for a sec - what would it take to convince you? A voice from heaven? An angel with a flaming sword? Something even more dramatic?)

What's the point? Well, the first question gets at the fact that most of us probably DO have some really big questions we'd like to have answered, things we just can't figure out on our own. This group is meant to be a safe place where we can work on getting answers to our spiritual questions.

The second question gets at something else, though - almost all of us could probably find a way of explaining away an answer we didn't like. A voice from heaven? I must be hearing things! An angel with a sword? I must be seeing things! Video tape? Come on - someone just photoshopped it!

See where this is going? If God really did suddenly answer our questions, we could always find a way of writing it off. It's kind of like dealing with a conspiracy theorist who doesn't want to believe it was Islamic terrorists who flew the planes into the Twin Towers on 9/11 - anyone who wants NOT to believe badly enough can always find a reason not to.

Why is this important? Well, Christianity says God speaks to us through Scripture (the Holy Bible). Many of us will be skeptical of that claim, and for good reasons (which we'll see below). At the same time, we also need to be skeptical of ourselves - after all, how can we be sure that we're not just acting like conspiracy theorists, looking for reasons not to believe an inconvenient truth?

Consequently, here's one of the basic operating principles we want to embrace in our Explorers Groups - yes it's ok to be skeptical of Scripture, to ask hard questions and be leery of easy answers; at the same time, we also want to be skeptical of ourselves, to ask why we DON'T want to believe that the pronouncements in Scripture might actually be God's word to us.

We think the best way to do both of these is in a diverse group of friends, where some of us believe and some of us don't, but where our friendship isn't contingent on our agreeing.

Why Scripture? (the rub)

If we want to take a fresh look at Jesus, we're going to have to take a look at Scripture. And that's what we want to focus on this opening week.

How on earth can anyone actually take the Bible seriously? Wasn't it written thousands of years ago? Isn't it based on dead languages that nobody really understands? Isn't it full of errors and contradictions? Aren't there a gazillion different ways of interpreting it? How are we supposed to know who's right?

And where do Christians get off, claiming it was written by God? Wasn't it written by men hundreds of years after the fact? And didn't church officials decide what books were in or out? Surely Jesus wouldn't expect us to take it literally? How could something like this even be relevant to intelligent people in the 21st century?

These are great questions. You could boil them all down to this: Could the Bible really be God's word to us? It seems so unlikely; could anyone believe this without turning off their brain?

Why Scripture? (the response)

That's what we want to wrestle with in Week 1, and we think the best way to do it is not by dodging the questions, but by tackling them head on.

1. The Case AGAINST Scripture - (yep, there are some good reasons to be skeptical)
   
2. The Case FOR Scripture - (wow, there's also good reasons to take it seriously!)

Why don't you take a second and read each of these links.

Going Forward

So what's our point? On the one hand, we really can't prove that Scripture is the Word of God. On the other, many of it's supposed "defects" actually make it a piece of really significant historical evidence that deserves thoughtful consideration. At the end of the day, it's the best window we have into the Jesus of history.

Here's what this means for us as Explorers. As we move forward, we're going to be looking at the Gospel of Mark. This isn't a cop out - it's just being intellectually responsible. Mark is data; thoughtful people consider the data before coming to a conclusion.

Here's a hint about how to read this book. Rather than assuming up front that it couldn't have happened as Mark says, why don't we try assuming that it did? Try suspending your disbelief for a bit (trust me, you're not going to end up selling flowers in an airport if you do this). Try evaluating Jesus from the perspective of those who believed in him first, and see what you think.

There's plenty about Mark's Jesus that might still rub you wrong (and if that's the case, you'll have much better reasons for rejecting him outright). But you might just discover a Jesus you didn't know existed - a Jesus who is beautiful, potent, and real. The Jesus of Scripture, the Jesus of history.

Sound interesting? Let's check him out by looking at the Gospel of Mark!

The Case AGAINST Scripture

If you were going to make a case against Scripture, how would you go about it? Most people intuitively feel like this book, this Bible, is a little hard to swallow, but how would you quantify that? What makes it so hard to accept as 'the Word of God'? That's the purpose of this post: to flesh out a case against Scripture.

If I were a prosecuting attorney, I'd use Scripture as a star witness against itself, to show 4 basic points:

1. no one can prove that the Bible is God's word (so there's a certain measure of doubt built in to the equation - how are we supposed to know for sure?)

2. the magnitude of Scripture's claims make us more dubious, not less (the way Scripture views itself actually makes it harder to believe, not easier - so how do we take it seriously?)

3. hand copies inevitably result in lots of copies and variations (a nice way of saying 'errors' - so how do we know which reading is right?)

4. everyone has different opinions and interpretations (look, even if we only had one manuscript, no one could agree on what it means anyway - so who's right?)

In short, if God was really going to communicate with us, wouldn't Scripture be one of the least likely ways for him to do it? It seems so prone to miscommunication, doubt, disbelief. Let's flesh out each of these objections to make the case clearer...

1. No one can prove that the Bible is God's word

Look, if we're really serious about honesty (and Christians of all people should be), then lets just state the obvious: we cannot prove that the Bible is God's word. Anyone who says otherwise is either loopy or they're selling something. And 99.9% of Christians are going to agree with this assertion anyway (because it takes faith to believe, right?)

2. The magnitude of Scripture's claims

Of course, some people might want to try and salvage Scripture by suggesting that it doesn't actually claim to be inspired, or that if it is, it's the general ideas behind the words - the 'timeless principles' rather than the 'specific words' themselves. The problem with this approach that it doesn't actually jive with the data - Scripture itself makes some huge claims about itself. How do we know it's the Word of God? Because it says so! (hmm, isn't that a little circular?).

Go ahead: let's look at some of these claims for ourselves:

1. it claims to be the very word of God (cf. 2 Timothy 3:16 - "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness...")

2. it claims that God is the primary author, not man (cf. 2 Peter 1:20-21 - "No prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit")

3. Old Testament (OT) authors viewed their message (both spoken -and- written) as God's authoritative word (cf. Jer 26, 36 - OT prophets are always thundering "thus says the Lord!" and they see their written words just as binding as their oral statements).

4. Jesus and New Testament (NT) believers embrace the OT as God's authoritative word - they constantly say "it is written!" and then quote Scriptures to settle all arguments (cf. Matthew 4:4 - where Jesus rebukes Satan with Deuteronomy 8:3, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but every word that comes from the mouth of God!")

5. Jesus believes not just the ideas but also the words are inspired - in fact, at one point he bases his entire argument on the tense of a single verb in an OT passage (cf. Matthew 22:31-32 - "As for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: 'I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? He is not God of the dead, but of the living.")

6. Jesus sees his own words as carrying even great authority (cf. Matthew 5:21,27 - "You have heard it said... [he quotes the OT]... but I say to you... [then he offers his own commandment which goes further than the OT command]")

7. Jesus' followers see him as the ultimate word of God (cf. Hebrews 1:1-2 - "Long ago, at many times and in various ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us through by his Son...")

8. the Apostle Paul (who wrote most of the NT) speaks of his own message as being identical with the word of God (cf. 1 Thessalonians 2:13 - "when you received the word of God [eg. Paul's message], which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as what it really is, the word of God...")

9. the Apostle Peter (one of Jesus' top three disciples) speaks of Paul's writings as being on par with the rest of Scripture (cf. 2 Peter 3:15-16 - "our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given to him... the ignorant and unstable twist [his words] to their own destruction, as they do with the other Scriptures")

10. the Christian Scriptures insist the miraculous elements are essential, not incidental (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:14,19 - "If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain... we are of all people most to be pitied")

Uggh! Not only does the Bible seem to see itself as inspired, but it also seems adamant that much of what it says is meant to be taken literally rather than metaphorically. So Scripture makes it even harder to believe this is God's word, because it asks us to believe so much.

3. Lots of copies and variations

Feeling the weight yet? Now try this on for size. For the past 1500-2500 years, the Christian Scriptures were copied by hand. Scribes (even the best of them!) are human. Humans make mistakes, and over this big of a timespan, we'd expect to see a lot of them.

Sure enough, the data seems to support our suspicion - just looking at the NT, we discover that there are some 5000 Greek manuscripts, 8000 Latin manuscripts, and thousands more in other languages. That's a lot of copies. Now here's the kicker - if we look at larger 'book size' manuscripts, there is not a single hand-copy which is identical to any other. And if we tally up all the differences, there are some 30,000 - 40,000 total discrepancies. That's a lot of variations.

So even if the original 'autograph' (the master copy) WAS inspired directly by God, how do we know which our copies is closest? After all, we don't have the original (and how would we know it if we did?)! All we have are lots of copies with tons of variations! Egad!

4. Lack of consensus

Finally, let's pretend for a moment that we actually DID have the original - one manuscript, zero variations, copied perfectly by someone who got it straight from the horse's mouth (so to speak). Even if we could all agree on such a text, everyone still seems to have a different opinion or interpretation as to what it actually means. So even if it IS the word of God, how could we possibly know who is right?

Wow. The evidence seems pretty damning - how could any intelligent, rational, educated person living in the 21st century actually believe that a book like the Bible is the Word of God? It just seems so unlikely!

Ok, so that's my case AGAINST Scripture. Now let's try and make the case FOR Scripture...

The Case FOR Scripture

Ok, we've made a case against Scripture. Whether you believe in Jesus or not, I hope you're feeling the weight of that argument - if you're not, maybe you haven't read it carefully enough. At the very least, it should give us empathy and respect for people who don't believe in Scripture - they have some pretty good reasons for feeling dubious.

Now here's the good news (if you're looking for the historical Jesus). The objections raised are not nearly as damning as they might seem at first blush. The purpose of this post is to flesh out a Christian response, to make a case for Scripture.

We'll do that by taking a closer look at each of the 4 basic arguments (working in reverse order). The counter argument runs something like this:

4. Lack of consensus? - We're actually masters of communication (and skepticism)!

3. Too many copies and variations? - It makes the text more accurate, not less!

2. Magnitude of Scripture's claims? - We can't prove the claims, but all the evidence indicates that Jesus' immediate followers actually made them!

1. But you still can't prove it's the Word of God, can you? - of course not! But that doesn't mean it's not hard data that deserves serious consideration!

Let's take a look at each of these in turn...

4. Masters of Communication (and Skepticism)

The basic thrust of that final argument is that even if we had a single text we all agreed upon, we still couldn't agree on it's meaning. There are too many interpretations. Communication (especially about religious issues) is simply too hard.

Many people probably feel this way, but it doesn't take much reflection to realize the situation is not as dire as it might seem. Sure every statement is subject to interpretations, but that's true of all speech and writing, not just Scripture.

For instance, when I tell Theresa at the Kettlehouse, "Hey, you look hot today," I might be making a casual remark about the temperature (eg. "Hmm, you're sweating more than usual. Must be hot in here!") -OR- I might be making a pass (eg. "Hey, you look HOT!” - *wink, grin*).

Both are interpretations are possible. But context and tone make my intended meaning obvious (and if you've been to the KHole in July, you'd know instantly which it was).

As humans, we are remarkably attuned to making such distinctions. We are not only capable of communication, we are good at it. We know how to send messages, and we know how to receive them. That's true for regular speech, and it's true for the written word as well (after all, why do students spend so much time reading books? Because they're a great medium for communication!). If we're good at unraveling what others mean when they speak, there's a good chance we can unravel what Scripture means when it speaks.

Now, we are not denying that some passages of Scripture are hard to understand. Nor are we minimizing the importance of listening carefully when interacting with someone from another culture (and Scripture is most definitely not coming from a modern, 20th c. American culture!).

The point, however, is that for much of Scripture, the meaning is surprisingly clear - that's why even small children can get the gist most of the time. Even passages which seem difficult often make much more sense when we read them sympathetically in the context of the rest of Scripture.

There was a key word in that previous sentence: sympathetically. A bigger problem with interpretation, of course, is not that we don't understand what Scripture says - it's that we don't particularly like what it means.

For example, when Jesus speaks of adultery as going well beyond the physical act to include even lustful gazing, his meaning is clear: most normal males are adulterers in their hearts. This is not a popular position (who wants to think of themselves as sexually deviant?). The easiest solution, of course, is to assume that it must actually mean something else, something that doesn't implicate me.

Want proof? Start paying attention to when this card gets used - we typically don't start saying, "well there's lots of interpretations..." until someone else makes an assertion we don't like (usually because it would implicate us).

And that brings us to another point - not only are we master communicators, but we are also master skeptics.

Think about that for a moment: we are remarkably skeptical when it comes to Scripture, and we are remarkably unskeptical when it comes to ourselves. It's like trying to convince a girl that the guy she is dating is no good - no amount of reasoning will change her mind if she doesn't want to believe it. Why? Because she has a stake in the argument. She has something to lose if you're right.

What's the point here? We like to think of ourselves as neutral observers. In reality, however, we all have a dog in the fight when it comes to Scripture, because Scripture makes claims on our lives. Of course this doesn't prove that it's the word of God - it just means that we ought to be as suspicious of ourselves as we are of Scripture. And most of us (even Christians) aren't.

3. Copies and variations: More = Better

This may seem counter-intuitive at first blush, so let me see if I can explain. Any time you copy something by hand, you inevitably make mistakes and introduce variations. You might misspell a word, drop part of a sentence, maybe even re-work a sentence without thinking about it. Copy the copies, and the same thing happens over and over again. The greater number of copies, the great number of variations and errors, right?

Yes and no. You might indeed have more variations. But you also have a greater number of sources to check a particular copy against. If you only have one or two documents, you'll have a hard time knowing where the errors are. But if you had dozens, or hundreds, or thousands, your odds of identifying the errors increase significantly.

Knowledge based websites like Wikipedia actually rely on this same principle. Since anyone in the world (not just experts) can 'correct' a document, you might think the quality of the content would go down (more 'errors', since no editor has perfect knowledge, and if you make everyone an editor, well who knows what they'll write!). Surprisingly, however, accuracy actually improves with this approach! Why? Because more eyes make make it easier to spot and correct errors.

The same is true for any ancient document. Over the past several centuries, the scientific field of textual criticism has blossomed. Some of you geeky types (like me) might actually want to know a little bit about the details about textual criticism.

For the rest of you, here's a summary of the key implications:

• modern translations of the NT text are extremely close to the original autographs

• most of the textual variations are minor, obvious, identifiable, and correctable (we can explain the cause and identify the original)

• in most Bibles, any significant textual variations are clearly marked and the variant readings are given (ask me how to spot them!)

• even if you substituted the worst possible readings for all variations, the NT would be intelligible and the message would be the same (in fact, the average reader probably wouldn't notice the differences; it's that close!)

All this means that the Bible sitting in front of you is trustworthy. It's a pretty darn accurate representation of what was originally written down some 2000 years ago. Of course, that still doesn't mean that it's God's word. But it does mean that it's a piece of significant historical data that deserves serious consideration.

It is very likely Jesus said the things Scripture has him saying (well, in Aramaic, not English, of course). So we need to deal with that data, not dance around it by asserting "Oh, well I'm sure he didn't say that!" If someone wants to construct a Jesus other than the one we read about in the Bible, they need to present historical evidence to support it.

2. The claims of Scripture

There's a gaping hole in our defense thus far - have you noticed it? Someone could say,

"Look, all you've done is demonstrate that the Bible is an accurate representation of what the original authors wrote. But none of the texts claim Jesus as their author! So how do we know that his followers didn't just make things up?

How can we be sure they didn't co-opt the historical Jesus (a great teacher, surely), to create a religious movement of their own making (w/ a sexier, more dramatic, agenda driven Jesus). And how do we know that the later church didn't just suppress alternative accounts of Jesus, picking which books were part of the canon (the 'approved list') and which ones weren't?"

These are great questions. Several considerations may help frame an answer:

1. Extrabiblical evidence - First, it's worth pointing out that we don't just know about Jesus from the Bible - there are secular, non-Christian historians who mention him as well. Now granted, there are only six short references to him outside of the Christian Scriptures, but the fact that there are any at all is actually significant - that an unknown Jewish carpenter in a remote part of the empire could attract the attention (and scorn) of elite Roman historians is nothing less than remarkable.
   
   In a book called Simply Christianity, John Dickson summarizes what we can glean from them (p18):
   

   • when Jesus lived
   • where he lived
   • that he was an influential teacher
   • that he engaged in activities thought to be supernatural
   • that he was executed; when and by whom
   • that he had a brother called James who was also executed
   • that people claimed to have seen him raised from the dead
   • that he was widely known by the prestigious title 'the Christ'
   
   That may not seem like much, but it's it's worth noting how much basic correlation there is with the Biblical account. Again, it doesn't prove the Christian version is true, but the extrabiblical evidence certainly doesn't suggest a remarkably different view of Jesus.

2. Early autographs = harder to fib - Second, it's also worth noting that the early dates of the manuscript evidence (above) actually make the Biblical evidence much harder to fabricate. The NT texts claim to be written by eyewitnesses or were based on first hand accounts of eyewitnesses. Scholars of all stripes agree that the original documents were penned within 20-70 years of the events they describe. That means any false claims would have been easily refutable by those who had been there.

3. Motive and cost - Third, such deception would require collusion of the grandest scale - one of Jesus' closest friends (Peter), his own half-brother (James) and a high profile enemy of the early church (Paul) all got together to fabricate an incredible scam. Why? To create a movement that would exert power and control? The earliest followers of Jesus had very little influence (most of them were poor or slaves). And at what price? For many believers, their faith cost them their lives. We might expect that of those who came later (eg. they just didn't know it was true), but what founders would be willing to die for something they knew to be false?

4. Which books are in? - You'll often hear that the Bible didn't assume it's present form until the middle of the 4th century, when a council of Bishops got together and "picked" which books where in and which were out. That's not quite true.
   
   The earliest definitive lists that we have date from this period, and there was debate about some books prior to this, but almost all biblical scholars (even those who don't believe in Jesus) agree that for most early Christians, their canon was pretty much the same as our by AD 200. And even here, this was not so much a matter of "decision" as it was of "recognition".
   
   This is an important point. How many of us would believe a certain list of books came directly from the mouth of God simply because a certain group of officials said so? None of us would! So what makes us think that people two thousand years again were any more credulous than us? Such a position is actually quite arrogant (eg. we're smart, they were obviously dumb), and dare I say it, American.
   
   Ultimately, most Christians both then and now embrace a concept of "authoritative books" not because someone tells them too, but because they encounter something real in them. The best evidence against "alternative gospels" is to go read them - you encounter a completely different Jesus, and he's much less compelling.

Ok, so that's how we think about the claims of Scripture - we haven't resolved them per se, but we have suggested that we have good evidence to think they are very early. It's certainly not irrational or foolish to think that the people who hung out with the real historical Jesus personally believed he said and did exactly what they wrote.

It actually takes a lot of faith to think that the historical Jesus was dramatically different from what we see in the pages of the NT - those who argue this way do so on the basis of conjecture, not historical evidence.

1. So does this prove the Bible is the Word of God?

Of course not! We can never prove that the Bible is God's Word to us - it really is a matter of faith, after all - but we can make a pretty compelling case that it's a huge chunk of substantial evidence.

Evidence like this needs to be weighed, considered, and evaluated. Regardless of your conclusions, any intelligent person owes it to themselves to actually consider the evidence, to develop an informed, thoughtful opinion.

Conclusions

So where does this leave us? The fact we can't know it for sure shouldn't really surprise us. The people who wrote Scripture actually seem well aware of it - they always assert that truth is something God himself has to reveal to us, cf. 1 Cor 2:14). It's actually quite easy not to believe.

Most of us have actually experienced this firsthand - anyone who doesn't want to believe something can always give reasons why they don't buy it. Think of your favorite conspiracy theorist - you can never convince them that their theory is wrong. It's not so much an issue with the data as it is with them: you can never convince anyone of something they don't want to believe.

So the real challenge is not just how to evaluate Scripture, but how to evaluate ourselves. How can we be certain that we're not just buying a gigantic conspiracy theory, one that desperately says Scripture is a hoax. Sure we'll be skeptical of some of the things it says. But we also need to be skeptical of ourselves. We need to be skeptical of our skepticism, we need to ask why we find it difficult to believe. Is the problem with Scripture, or is the problem with me?

At the end of the day, we have two Jesus' to choose from - the Jesus of Scripture, or the Jesus of our imagination. Only one of those has any historical basis.

The Science of Textual Criticism

Here's a brief explanation of the theory behind textual criticism.

Textual criticism doesn't have anything to do with making negative statements about texts (eg. criticizing). Instead, it's the technical term for the scientific art of reconstructing ancient texts - it's a hard science (eg. really smart PhD types), whose principles are rigorous (eg. always favor the harder reading), it's practitioners are diverse (eg. more unbelievers and skeptics in this field than believers), and it works for both secular and religious texts.

Fundamentally, what makes textual criticism work is that humans don't typically make random errors; they make common errors, for common reasons. Which means if you study enough texts, you can actually learn how to identify an error and reconstruct how it happened. Some are obvious (mispellings). Others are less so (intentional changes). But here's the point, the better you can understand why the change occurred, the better you can figure out what the original text was.

Here's the key - there are two things that make textual criticism work:

1. lots of source manuscripts (eg. many 'eyes'), and
   
2. the older they are the better (because older gets you closer to the original).
   

Suddenly, what seemed to be a weakness of Scripture actually turns out to be a strength - there are dramatically more ancient witnesses for the biblical texts than for any other documents out there!

For example, let's consider some famous texts which scholars rely on to learn about history...

Text	Date Written	Oldest surviving copy	Gap from original	Copies in existence today
Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War	400 BC	AD 900	1300 years	73
Caesar's Gallic War	50 BC	AD 825	875 years	10
Tactitus' Histories and Annals	AD 100	AD 850	750 years	2
New Testament	AD 40 - AD 100	AD 350	310 years	14,000 (5000 Greek, 8000 Latin, and 1000 in other languages)

Did you catch those numbers for the NT documents? They are amazing! Scholars have HUGE numbers of texts to work from. And even though the oldest manuscript is from AD 350, we actually have many fragments from the second and third centuries AD, with the earliest being a portion of the Gospel of John dating AD 120-140 (that's within 40-60 years of the autograph!).

No other works of antiquity come close to this. To state it another way, your average New Testament down at Barnes & Noble is translated from a Greek text that rests on far better historical evidence than your college history books on ancient Greece and Rome. No modern textual scholar (secular or otherwise) will dispute this.

Are we saying that you shouldn't trust your college history books? Of course not! We're saying that you CAN have a high degree of confidence that the New Testament on your bedstand is very close to what was originally written back in the 1st c. AD. Wow. That's kind of cool!

Vision Workshop

VISION - It's nice to know where you're headed.

This coming Saturday, January 17 we'll be hosting an All Souls Vision Workshop from 8:45 AM - 1 PM at the Cryder's (2307 River Road).

This is probably one of the most important things we've done thus far. The Vision Dinners painted a picture for the kind of community we'd like to create; the Vision Workshop will unpack our strategy for getting there. After all, it's nice to know where you're headed. :-)

We'll flesh out our understanding of what a church is (and isn't!), we'll share specific goals for the next 6-12 months, and we'll work together to figure out the best way to get there. This is a great opportunity to see how the vision plays out - to study the roadmap, kick the tires, ask questions, and offer feedback. It will be very hands on. And you'll go away with a clear picture of who we are, where we're headed, and how you can be more involved.

If you consider All Souls your church home it's extremely important for you to attend if at all possible - it'll help you know how to move deeper in our community, and it'll help us know you want to do so.

If you're simply curious about All Souls, this will be a great way to evaluate us - to peer beneath the surface and find out what we're really up to here in Missoula.

Even if you're skeptical about All Souls (or Jesus!), you're still welcome too - this is a great way to see the dirt. We desire to be open and honest, even if that means you end up going somewhere else.

So regardless of where you're at in your spiritual journey, we really hope you will join us for this special event. If you are at all interested in this thing called All Souls, we think you'll be glad you came. Breakfast and lunch will be provided. Childcare will be available at the Sutherland's (1601 W Kent). What we need from you is an RSVP.

For more information, please contact Christian (529-5568) or Ryan (529-2468).