MYC happenings
This year’s Mid Year Conference was on Worship. The whole conference was excellent. I couldn’t help learning a lot, being encouraged and really challenged.
It was actually the same topic as the first MYC I went to four years ago, but there’s always more to learn.
Each day we had seminars, bible studies, electives and a talk. The seminars went through the Old Testament law: the role of the temple, priests and sacrifices in worshipping God, how that relates to Jesus and how we should respond to that. The bible studies were in manuscript discovery style (not exactly the same, but similar to the description by Chris Sommerfield) on the book of Joel. I attended electives on the controversial passages, 1 Corinthians 11 and 14 (which, I think, would not be so controversial if people read them properly in context). The talks were excellent and raised some interesting questions.
Thinking Questions
I’d like to pose some of those questions here before I write about what I learnt this week. If you have any response to them that you care to share, leave a comment.
I guess the obvious one, before the week even started: What is worship?
Not as obvious ones:
Does asking to be worshipped make God unworthy of worship?
Should we be the ones to decide what’s good and evil?
Limericks
One of the tidbits during the week was the writing of limericks. People wrote limericks about the seminars, Joel, and Grimmo (Paul Grimmond) — who we’ve just said goodbye to as the pastor of UniChurch and Chaplain of UNSW.
I wrote a limerick…
Ode to Blood Spilled
Adam and Eve in the garden
Having sinned could receive no pardon
Blood spilled from the beast
Could not perfect in the least
But now Jesus’ blood brings us great freedom
Yeah, I know. Garden, pardon, freedom is not a great rhyme, but the only other rhyming word I had was “harden”… I couldn’t make it fit. There were some much better and more humourous ones, but I didn’t write them down.
Let me know what you think of the questions above. I’ll be writing at least one more post about what I learnt, as well as posting some new haiku.
Hi Kristarella 🙂
It was good to see you and the Science guys on Thursday night – ah I miss MYC.
Hey – I was looking for that link we talked about – but couldn’t find it. Perhaps I’m blind. Or Perhaps you’ve updated.
Could you email me the link? Thanks 🙂 (I don’t have your email)
What is Mid Year Conference?
Whatever it is, it sounds great. Jerrol and I just started attending a new church and we love it because the pastor is always presenting new ways to look at the text, particularly in light of its historical significance.
What is worship?
Kind of a general question. Do you mean “how does it manifest itself?” Worship can be anything–singing is what most readily comes to mind, but it can be acts of kindness that bring glory to God or even just meditating on different aspects of Him.
Does asking to be worshipped make God unworthy of worship?
I had a friend in high school that was on the worship team and he struggled with this exact thing. I think that God’s ways are so much loftier than our little finite minds can understand. Worship is more for us and our minds and hearts than for Him. This reminds me of the controversy over “faith, without works, is dead.” It comes down to this: if you truly love God, you will want to worship Him regardless.
Should we be the ones to decide what’s good and evil?
Trick question! I don’t think we can decide this because we are inherently sinful (notice I didn’t say “evil” ). Only a perfect being can justly decide what is right and wrong. Can we judge an act as sinful or not? Most of the time, yes. It gets tricky when there are situations like someone steals food in order to survive. Is that a sin? Well, you could argue yes, stealing is a sin, but beyond that, not trusting God to provide for your needs is a sin. Hmm… we’ll see if you feel the same way when you are actually in that situation (not “you” personally, Kris); it’s easy to make blanket judgments when we have never experienced true, desperate need like that.
Looking forward to hearing what you learned on these questions and what your own responses are! Did you change your mind on any of them as you listened to the speakers?
Hey Lauren,
Mid Year Conference is a week away with Christians from uni, run by Campus Bible Study.
I’ll provide some of my own thoughts in the next post, but as for the first quesion, the initial answer given in the talks was not about its manifestation, but the final talks (after we’d thought long and hard about what worship is and what its for) gave some pointers about actually doing it.
In regards to the last question, should we decide good and evil? I think it’s obvious that we want to decide what is good for ourselves and we have failed. Freedom from oppression, freedom of speech… these are society’s catch-cries, but we are all enslaved to sin, society doesn’t see that freedom is to live the way we were made to live.