“He (Mark) is the most original author of the four.”
Anderson, Janice Capel and Moore, Stephen D. (ed.), “Mark and Method – new approaches in biblical studies”, Augsbury Fortress 1992. (p4)

Why read the gospel?

A story: Once upon a time…
Two questions: Who is Jesus? What has he got to do with me?

Context - recent interests in Jesus: “Da Vinci Code”, “Passion of Christ”, “Jesus Tomb”, “Gospel of Thomas”

Being a disciple: Rabbinic discipleship model: imitate your teacher

Why according to Mark (kata markon)?

Mark is the shortest gospel, also the most condensed. Let make out life easier by starting small. Mark is almost half the length of Luke, 40 percent of Matthew and a full 200 verses or 25 percent shorter than John.

This is the last class, it seems a bit ironic that a class on church practices do not have a session on teaching, so here we go.

The following are my notes but obviously the discussion went in many different directions but the notes still hold as the gist of what we discussed.

Teaching in the church

1. Why?
Great commission: (Mt 28:19-20, Mk 16:15-18, Lk 24:45-49, Jn 17:18,20:21 Acts 1:8)

In a nutshell Jesus left us with a two part commission, make disciples and proclaim the gospel.

In retrospect, I’ll call this session: “the reality of the worship experience”

1. Recap what we have done with worship in the past weeks, Carlin gave a summary from his class last week and Michelle read from her notes on Nolan’s class on worship with the Word.

2. To set some context for discussion we read: “9.5 theses on worship” by Gary A. Parrett from Ct

3. We focused on one single theses: “worship should be a life style not just a time slot”

Carlin lead today with this handout.

Carlin's leading this section of the class and he brought in a special guest, Pastor Nolan! Here is Pastor Nolan's handout (with the blanks filled in).