depth class

By jason on

Dorothy Sayers once observed that "there was never anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy, nothing so sane and so thrilling."  I would guess, however, that most folks would beg to disagree with Sayers.  Heresy is the thing that's exciting, edgy, interesting, and perilous.  Just the word "orthodoxy," meaning right belief, seems a heavy-handed word that entails dullness, boredom, and exclusion.  Or perhaps all this talk about belief and orthodoxy and heresy just seems antiquated.  Instead we should focus on action and let beliefs be a private matter.  Relativism, that giving up of thinking truth can be found, is certainly en vogue.

By jason on

Growing up, evolution was a huge issue for me.  I was convinced that my faith rested on evolution being a myth which made biology class almost as scary as prom.  Every time I cracked open the text book I was on the lookout for some new way that science would take one more strut out of the foundation of my faith.  It wasn't until after college that I began to feel that maybe, just maybe, God was actually big enough to handle being Creator and Sustainer, regardless of whether I ended up being young earth or old earth, creationist, evolutionist, or intelligent designist.

By jason on

Worship is the love, praise, and honor that we express to God.  From icons to incesnse to chants, the church through the ages has practiced a myriad of ways to worship.  Yet, despite our rich history, the church today often equates worship only with, and then usually only one genre.  In this deptch class we'll look how can worship extend to every one of our senses.  Can we sense God's presence with sight, touch, smell, and sound?

By jason on

Quest has always affirmed women in ministry, but it has been a while since we have had a sustained discussion on why that is and how we can take the discussion further.

During this three week depth class we'll have small group discussion, lectures, and exercises to get us asking questions like: what is the Scriptural basis for Quest's affirmation of women in ministry? we have the new identity of "brothers and sisters" in the church, but can men and women be friends? what does it mean to be women and what it means to be men "in Christ" and how we can construct our ideas of gender from a Biblical perspective rather than solely from the messages our culture bombards us with?

The class will be Monday nights from 7-9pm at the Q Cafe on Sep. 22nd, Sep. 29th, and Oct. 6th. To cover the cost of the reader, the class costs $10.

RSVP your spot online »

Also, be sure to check out the Lauren Winner conference on Faith and Gender which will be on Oct. 10th & 11th

By jason on

Love it or hate it, the intersection of evolution & Christian faith is a discussion that keeps coming up.  And perhaps rightly so since both of them are concerned with some of the big questions such as "where did we come from?" and "what is our purpose?" Unfortunately, pop media and many in Christian circles have often polarized the two camps, pitting them against each other as incompatible enemies of each other.  The truth lies more in the middle, with both sides having insights that may benefit and questions that will challenge the other.

Come join us for a discussion of how evolution and Christianity intersect, from both scientific and theological perspectives.  The class will be taught by two Quest members who are profs at SPU: Bo Lim who teaches Scripture and Eric Long who teaches ecology and animal biology.

When: Oct. 30th (thur) and Nov. 6th (thur) from 7-9pm

Where: Q Cafe

RSVP: by emailing jason@seattlequest.org

By jason on

We pray to God the Father, Son, and Spirit, but believe in one God, how does that work?  Jesus died and rose, but just how does that accomplish salvation?  What do we do with the tensions and contradictions in Scripture?  How do we affirm that God is good when we see and hear of so much evil in the world?

These are tough, big questions, but they're also good questions.  They are good because they push us to love God with our minds.  They connect us with the larger Christian community both now and in the past who have wrestled with the whats and whys of the Christian life.  And these are questions for everyday life, because how we think and speak of God influences how we serve God.  Here's the lineup of topics for our 3 week series: