We had the lecture and discussion yesterday about hell in my church. Wow, was that ever good! Going into the discussion I didn’t know what to expect of people being that this was a mainline (ELCA) church, and that we don’t usually talk about hell. I presented four people’s take on it: Martin Luther, CS Lewis, Carl Braaten, and Brian McLaren. It was a four views of hell approach. The thing that impressed me the most is that an actual conversation went on about what people [b:fdf111d61a]really[/b:fdf111d61a] believe. I told everyone that I had never been in a church where people could be free to actually grapple with an issue like this, and share concerns or different interpretations of scripture. Most people there wanted to defend the doctrine of hell, but also wanted to maintain an approach to evangelism that wasn’t fear-driven.
There was one 85 (or so) year old guy at the end who came up to me and said, "this was all very stimulating, but don’t forget sola scriptura" I think what he was saying was, it’s great you had your little discussion, but what does God say? I told him that while I believe scripture is God’s word, he has still given me the task of interpreting it.
Does anyone know how to pod cast? I have the whole thing recorded digitally but no where to put it online. It’s very fair to all sides so if anyone would like to host it I’d sure appreciate the gesture.
Taylor
Nov 12 2007
10:24 am
We had the lecture and discussion yesterday about hell in my church. Wow, was that ever good! Going into the discussion I didn’t know what to expect of people being that this was a mainline (ELCA) church, and that we don’t usually talk about hell. I presented four people’s take on it: Martin Luther, CS Lewis, Carl Braaten, and Brian McLaren. It was a four views of hell approach. The thing that impressed me the most is that an actual conversation went on about what people [b:fdf111d61a]really[/b:fdf111d61a] believe. I told everyone that I had never been in a church where people could be free to actually grapple with an issue like this, and share concerns or different interpretations of scripture. Most people there wanted to defend the doctrine of hell, but also wanted to maintain an approach to evangelism that wasn’t fear-driven.
There was one 85 (or so) year old guy at the end who came up to me and said, "this was all very stimulating, but don’t forget sola scriptura" I think what he was saying was, it’s great you had your little discussion, but what does God say? I told him that while I believe scripture is God’s word, he has still given me the task of interpreting it.
Does anyone know how to pod cast? I have the whole thing recorded digitally but no where to put it online. It’s very fair to all sides so if anyone would like to host it I’d sure appreciate the gesture.