Summer Sunday School for Adults

How does our faith connect with our particular context? This is a question that Christians have asked through the centuries, in very different times and places. This summer, we’ll explore the confessions of our church and what it means to confess our faith in our time. Come join us on Sundays at 9:15 in Grace Hall.   

June 1- Introduction to the Historical Creeds

June 8th- Confessions of the Reformation

June 15th- Barmen Declaration

June 22nd- Confession of 1967

June 29th- Brief Statement of Faith

July 6th- NO SUNDAY SCHOOL

July 13th- Belhar Confession

July 20th and 27th- Inspiration for finding our words of faith

You might begin with a few questions:

Why do we have confessions? The oldest confession in scripture is found in Deuteronomy 6 “The Lord is our God, the Lord is One”. It is the core belief of the Hebrew scriptures and becomes a way for the people of God to state their faith before the world. In Matthew 16, the disciple Peter gives words to the powerful claim of all those who would follow Jesus. “You are the messiah, the son of the Living God.”

Why does the church need confessions after the writing of scripture? “The church discovered very early that in order to protect its simple confession (Jesus is Lord) from misunderstanding and misuse, it had to talk about the relation between Jesus and the God of Israel, and between Jesus and the Holy Spirit. The earliest Christological confession became a Trinitarian confession.” (Book of Confessions, xiii) As the church grew and more questions about the life of God’s people grew as well, the church needed creeds and confessions to unite and educate. By the time of the Reformation, confessions were used to declare faith and draw distinctions between faith traditions.

Why do we have modern confessions? The Living God meets us where we are. We continue to study scripture and historical practices of the church in our own particular times and places. Over the last hundred years, the church has declared “Jesus is Lord” under the thumb of Nazi  Germany, through the social changes in America of the 1960’s, as two denominations separated by the Civil War found union in the 1980’s, and as the church fought the ugliness of apartheid in South Africa. Our modern confessions speak to our faith in the world we live in and the struggles we face as the church of Jesus Christ. 

We will take a deeper look at questions like these and hope to answer many more in our time together this summer.