Dear Christ Church,
I admit the subject line was meant to grab your attention, and I apologize for that. Still, I hope you’ll take a moment to read what follows.
Starting this week, you will notice a change in when you get my Weekly Word. Instead of coming on Wednesday, it will now arrive on Sunday afternoon.
There is a good reason for the change, and I am really excited about it.
This fall, our children and youth will be exploring the Old Testament together. Each Sunday, they will focus on a specific passage, learn the stories of Scripture, and discover who God is, what He is doing, and how the whole story points us to Jesus.
So I thought, why should they be the only ones? Therefore, each Sunday afternoon, my Weekly Word will focus on the same passage our children and students studied that morning. My hope is that this gives us, as an entire church, an opportunity to dive into God’s Word together.
For families, I especially encourage you to use it at home. Read the Weekly Word together. Ask your children what they learned that morning. Let them share the story. Ask what surprised them, what they noticed about God, or what questions they still have. Maybe make it part of your Sunday dinner.
You do not have to turn dinner into another Sunday school class. The goal is much simpler: just talk about the Bible together.
I also hope this goes beyond families with children. I’d love to see adults, teenagers, and children across our church talking about the same passages. Imagine a child telling an adult what they learned about David, Solomon, the Exile, or one of the prophets, and the adult already knows what they’re talking about because they’ve been thinking about the same passage.
In the coming months, we’ll journey through the Old Testament together. We will see God’s faithfulness, the struggles of His people, His promises, His covenant, and His ongoing work to rescue and restore. Most importantly, we’ll start to see what Jesus taught His disciples: the Old Testament was always leading somewhere. Again and again, God prepared His people for Jesus and revealed His plan of salvation.
My hope is that by the end of this journey, we will not just know more Old Testament stories. I hope we’ll understand the story of Scripture more clearly and see Jesus more fully.
I am excited for us to do this together.
Grace and peace,
Fr. Chase