Scripture-Guided Testimony

Some have said, with some justice, that Come Follow Me dumbs down the gospel.  It’s not just that we eschew the speculative stuff, its that everything gets reduced to Christ caring about you personally, which large swathes of the Old Testament, for example, are NOT about.   The new schedule would seem to make this problem worse.

But while I think there is some justice to the complaint, as a Sunday School teacher I have decided to lean in.  What we did this Sunday, pretty successfully, was what I would call ‘scripture-guided testimony.’  I encouraged people to share scriptures or passages from the reading that they had felt testified to when reading it, with no further comment necessary.  A simple ‘and I believe this’ if needed.  Some people didn’t limit themselves to that, but it worked well.  A transcript would have been banal but in person the Spirit was there.

One curious thing–I have noticed it before-was how the same little verse will sometimes have stood out to more than one of our congregants.

On Sunday it was Proverbs 22:13

The slothful man saith, There is a lion without, I shall be slain in the streets.