Periodically, Mennonite Weekly Review (a weekly inter-Mennonite newspaper) graciously invites me to be one of their writers for a 13-week series of columns focusing on biblical text used for quarterly international Sunday school lessons available for use by member denominations in the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.This is, by far, some of the most enjoyable published writing that I do (yes, I occasionally do more than blog), and this assignment is no exception. This quarter focuses on “Covenant Communities”—in particular, “God’s covenant as manifested in community”—and concentrates on passages starting in the Old Testament and then moves through Mark’s gospel and Peter’s letters in the New Testament.
Normally, each column is about 600 words but due to MWR’s publishing schedule, the first two columns were limited to 400 words each. Gads, and I thought 600 words (the regular word count for the columns) was a difficult limit to stay within, heh. Needless to say, there was more than one thing that I thought about or came across as I researched the texts that I couldn’t include in the columns. Maybe I’ll get to those in some follow-up posts here. Heh, maybe not.
Anyway, the first column—“Trust in the Lord”—is the first of four focusing on moments in the stories of several leaders in the covenant community (this one centers on Joshua and Joshua 1). And the second continues in that vein, skipping ahead several generations to Gideon: “Called as a people” (which works out of Judges 6).