Table Fellowship is the practice of welcoming children to the Lord’s table. In many Protestant churches, parents and children decide when taking communion is appropriate in a child’s faith journey and then one Sunday, the child begins to eat the bread and drink the wine. It’s a huge moment in the child’s faith journey, but mostly unbeknownst and uncelebrated by the rest of the congregation. LaGrave works to incorporate this step in a young person’s faith journey into corporate worship through a liturgical practice.
Thankfully, God never becomes frustrated with us. He’s patient with our impatience and continues to be faithful even though we’re easily forgetful. The tragedy is how we miss out on an invitation to experience God’s soothing, loving presence when our prayers are more focused on our problems than praying to experience Him.
Individualism isn’t new. The motivation for building the Tower of Babel, to “make a name for (them)selves” (Genesis 11), is timeless and universal to human experience. What’s new is that we’re living through a perfect storm of converging trends and circumstances that are pushing a post-Christian society past a tipping point.
Daily Seeds is a proven discipleship resource that works in a variety of contexts, including small groups and Sunday schools. Assuming your group meets weekly, class members should read one chapter from the 1 John study every day for 6 days. The 7th day of the week you will meet with your group to share, pray, and encourage one another with insights or struggles that group members encountered during the week’s readings.
In Boy Jesus, Joan Taylor provides us with that. Not ponderings, but expertly researched
historical and contextual details that help us make informed guesses about what Jesus’ childhood was like, how he interacted with his family, and how his community helped him prepare for his ministry.
Here are four things Boy Jesus helps us do to know Jesus better:
Perhaps you’ve heard of the Twelve Steps but don’t really know what they are. The coauthor of the Twelve Steps was a hopeless alcoholic named Bill Wilson who found recovery as the result of a Damascus Road–like spiritual experience in a hospital room where he was dying from alcoholism. From that day forward, Bill never drank again.
Every Christian today feels like an outsider in their own culture, and most don’t like it. To resolve that tension, they are tempted to conform to the culture, combat the culture, or cloister themselves from it. But what if we aren’t supposed to resolve the tension but live in it? What if Jesus wants us to be joyful outsiders and engage the culture?
I’ve been fascinated by biblical prophecy all my life, and nothing encourages me more than God’s predictions about the future. But I don’t make many predictions myself. The Bible is infallible; I’m not. Yet I’m going to predict right now that reading this book will make you feel like the farmer I read about in Kentucky.
We don’t know his name—he hasn’t divulged it, nor the exact location of his farm. But we know what he found.