Saturday Study Days
With some of our evening courses on Zoom, we have planned 3 optional extra in-person days dotted through the year. These will be held on Saturday mornings from 9:30-1:00pm and available to anyone. The cost is £5 but free to anyone who is attending any of the current courses.
Why Are We Running These?
The great advantage of running our evening courses online is that they can then be accessible to anyone, anywhere in the Partnership without the need to travel long distances. One of the big disadvantages is that it is harder to get to know one another and have more time for informal discussion over a coffee as we can do with the in-person courses. So these days provide the opportunity to meet up with one another and spend some time together in a more personal and relaxed way then is often possible over Zoom.
Each of the days are ‘stand alones’ so you can pick and choose which, if any, you would like to come to. Each of them connects with and links to a course that we are currently running, but all the days are open to anyone.
What are they?
- “Don’t just teach…..Preach!!” (Sat 5th February 2022)
Martyn Lloyd Jones said, “The most urgent need in the Christian Church today is true preaching; and as it is the greatest and the most urgent need in the Church, it is obviously the greatest need of the world also”.
In the first and second year courses, we invest a lot of time in teaching and putting into practice ‘expository tools’. Our great concern is to understand and explain what the biblical text is saying. There are various forms of ‘Word-Ministry’ in which we seek to teach God’s Word such as one-to-one or small groups but is there anything ‘distinctive’ about preaching? We do touch on this a little bit on our courses but this day is intended to explore more fully what is biblical preaching. Although not all of us may feel called to preach, it is also helpful for all of us to think through and understand what preaching is and what we should expect from preaching Sunday by Sunday as we gather together as the people of God.
- “Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility” Sat 26th March 2022)
‘Predestination’ – a missing jewel in our evangelism?
The second year course in-depth study of Romans includes chapters 9-11 where Paul teaches about predestination. This always provokes much discussion and raises many questions, even objections and concerns. This is a chance not only to explore the subject more fully and in greater depth but to see how Paul’s belief in the sovereignty of God far from demotivating him in evangelism rather serves to fuel his passion, zeal and expectancy in evangelism.
- “Revival” (Sat 7th May 2022)
“Will you not revive us again that your people may rejoice in you? (Psalm 85:6)
The aim of our third-year course is to encourage us to dig more deeply into the gospel of grace that we might know and experience more of its transforming power in our lives and in our churches, and further afield. One aspect of that is a study of revival.
John Stevens (FIEC) writes “we have never experienced revival in the church and have been neglectful of the history of revival. We have even been suspicious of the subject because all too often we have encountered the twin failings of spurious revivalism or an obsession with revival that despairs of the value of the ordinary regular ministry of the church”. This is an opportunity to explore biblical teaching about revival and study some of the occurrences of revival in church history with the aim of inspiring in us a renewed hunger for a true, powerful gospel-centred work of God in our nation.