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Faith Part 2

Register your interest here for Faith Part 2, a free 8-week online look at some crucial but lesser-taught riches of Christian faith that might help us when our initial faith experience falters a bit. After recording over a hundred podcasts and leading almost eight hundred focus groups on the kinds of faith that have gotten generations of Christians through life challenges at the level of the Bubonic Plague, beginning the week of February 3, we’ll explore things like: 

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  • Why Christian faith is in fact designed to transform as we age

    • It can seem strange that something as powerful as knowing and following Jesus is more than just one thing, but people like Teresa of Avila (who uses the metaphor of how we start off like a silkworm, but by nature enter a confusing cocoon before becoming this whole different being--a butterfly) walk us into a faith that can weather storms even as it transforms into something unexpected and beautiful.

  • Why quieting down is the most common way to launch into Faith Part 2

    • All the way back in the fourth century, the desert saints noted what’s become a commonplace idea today--that when things that once worked great for us quit working so well, we mostly thrash around as we try either to recapture those things or leave them behind. But our most promising way forward turns out to be a lasting stillness--which can be hard to nurture into being, but which then opens a heretofore-hidden door.

  • Let’s re-experience the delight of being alive in God’s world

    • As someone who converted from atheism as a young adult, Dave Schmelzer--who will lead the course--couldn’t believe the hope and possibilities that faith in Jesus opened up for me. Not only was he connected to a loving God who had all the power, but evidently that God was interested in who he actually was and what he could bring to the world. Amazing! But life doesn’t go as planned for most of us. Leaders like Ignatius of Loyola thought quite a bit about this, as if Faith Part 2 involves teasing out a fresh kind of delight.  

  • How not knowing what’s going on gets transformed into a superpower

    • As a young Christian, Dave got lots of great teaching about what the Bible taught about tons of interesting things, not least about what God was and wasn’t like. Good stuff! But it was a relief to him to find teachers like John of the Cross (and early bestsellers like The Cloud of Unknowing) who teach us how to navigate our persistent perplexities, as if they too have an essential role to play on our road towards union with God.

  • Let’s navigate a world that feels unsafe (and often unjust)

    • Howard Thurman might be the great modern teacher about walking with God in an unjust world--Martin Luther King is said to have kept one of Thurman’s books with him during each march. But beyond that, Thurman is one of our most profound thinkers about nurturing an ever-expanding internal world along this journey.

  • Let’s find renewed meaning in Faith Part 2

    • For some of us, early exuberance and idealism settles into repetitive day to day realities. What was our life supposed to be about again? In midlife, Hildegard of Bingen found herself not just founding faith communities, but also writing popular operas and becoming the world’s first homeopathic healer. Finding the meaning of our lives can take some patience in Faith Part 2, but once found it takes hold.

 

And we’ll look at things like: how to increasingly drop anxieties as God becomes an ever-bigger part of our inner world, how to find community in Faith Part 2, and how we might think about all the things we’ve learned along the way in our journey. And of course much more. 

 

You can register for one of three time slots for what will be hour (ish) long groups that will of course include the content above, but also time to process in smaller groups. Your options are: Mondays at 10am Pacific time, Wednesdays at 6pm PT, or Thursdays at 4pm PT.

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