This 6-week Lenten study, Is Loving Your Enemy Optional?: Nonviolence & the Bible, explores nonviolence–and violence–in Scripture. During Lent each year, the AD committee likes to focus on spiritual practices related to Jesus’s life and work. Nonviolence is actually central to Jesus’s teachings, and yet we often don’t talk about it in quite that way in church. Now seems to be a good time to take that on. If you’ve never been to an OASIS series before, feel free to jump in for this study. Over the series, we’ll examine Israel’s troubling history with violence (and God’s role in that) as well as Jesus’ teachings on enemies, peace, and being faithful in violent times. We hope to engage thoughtfully with difficult texts and explore how Christian nonviolence might shape our personal relationships, public witness, and responses to injustice today.
We gather in the Family Room as well as online (Zoom) from 9-10 am on Sunday mornings.