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The material we use for this course has been composed by our guest teacher John Birch.
John has visited our study group from Wales multiple times offering Q&A conversations to help us round out the courses we have done with him in the past!
- John visited us last year with this session: Poverty and Riches Guest teaching talk
- And in 2023: All God's Creatures Q&A with John Birch.
Please pray for John as we engage with this material he has lovingly crafted, and if you would like to learn more or support John's ministry here is his website: Faith & Worship.
How John introduces us to this course:
Within the Church year we celebrate Pentecost as the moment the promised Holy Spirit descended on the apostles whilst at prayer on the Feast of Shavuot (or Weeks), which was very much a harvest festival, but one also marking the moment in Jewish history when God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and revealed to him the Torah (the first five books of the Bible, or the Pentateuch). Jewish tradition has it that Moses then wrote the words that God dictated to him, either as he descended from the mountain or over a longer period.
As Christians we don’t really make much of the Holy Spirit coming at a time of harvest, and maybe miss something in the bigger picture of what was happening, so in these studies we begin at that point and then move on to perhaps more familiar passages. If we have in our mind the image of seed and harvest, then this can translate into Christ being the seed that has died, been planted, and sprung again to life.
This Bible study looks at both Old and New Testaments to get a bigger picture of what Pentecost can mean to us.