Truthseeker

Paula,

Loved your link to your ‘rant’ on Sunday schools!  Very refreshing!!!   How true it is that we tend to just keep folk in a perpetual state of ‘baby bird receiving the worm’ rather than growing people to become mama and papa birds spiritually.  Or worse, we just discuss Christian books without even opening the bible.

Love, too, your picture of what Jesus meant us to be and have as ‘church’.  That is so freeing and inspiring.  Helps, also, to hear that others struggle to find a ‘good’ church.  I would be happy to just find several believers who would be willing to meet in a home, without feeling like they had to have a man lead and teach the bible study.  Not that men aren’t good for that, but to insist on it usually means the man will teach with a heavy hand and squelch much discussion, especially any generated by a woman (in my experience in strict churches).

Speaking of churches and what Jesus did, I would highly recommend the dvd series, “Follow the Rabbi” by Ray Vanderlaan?  It is an excellent dvd series (about $200 for about 8 dvds with approx. 6  25 min. mini segments per dvd) that is filmed on site in Israel, etc. and Ray, who has studied Jewish culture extensively, both formally (PhD) and otherwise, teaches or shows us what it looked like in that context and culture.  He reveals some very interesting bits of info that really show how far, in some ways, we have come from what the early church looked like.  It doesn’t really address the issue of women in the church as a focus point anywhere, though some of what he shares does touch on it.  Learning the cultural context is SOOOOO helpful and he does a great job of presenting that.  (Just google Follow the Rabbi to find his site.)  Enough of this tangent.