Retreat at Vence - the teaching Sessions

John is a pastor in an international church and currently preparing a PhD at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Maybe I should make clear that this name uses "divinity" in a slightly archaic sense, to mean the study of God - like Theology,  divinity is the latin cognate of the greek word theology. It is not a school for aspiring divinities.

Anyway, having cleared that up, he did a great job with a difficult task, to introduce Revelation and to  expound the letters to the seven churches in four half-days. He steered a careful course between the rocks of various millennial opinions, eventually professing respect for the amillennial and historic pre-millennial views. Anyway, we were WAY before Rev 20, which is where the discussions heat up.

To be honest, the only real problem I had with the teaching sessions was that the programme was perhaps too ambitious. We had LOADS of sessions, sometimes one after the other, and scheduling one major teaching session per day would have been perhaps more practical.

However what came across to me again and with renewed force was how much the culture of the place where a church is situated colours and shapes that church's faith and practice. The church must be in "the world", by which I mean the world's outlook, way of life and values, but "the world" in that sense gets into the church, too.

We need to keep in mind that God has given to us a new culture, a heavenly one, that churches are colonies of the new humanity, of the world to come.

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