Understanding the Bible with Martyn Day
The St John’s Outreach Committee are pleased to invite you to a series of public theology workshops Understanding the Bible with Martyn Day.
This series runs over four back-to back evenings.
The first workshop is for everyone – including those who may be skeptical about the claims about the Gospels. Offering credible reasons for why the Gospels can be trusted, the following three workshops build on this topic. Although each workshop will make sense and be worthwhile distinct from the other workshops in the series.
Martyn Day pastors the South Harbour Vineyard Church in Auckland and is a highly competent and engaging communicator. A British export to NZ, Martyn is passionate about helping people to love, learn and live God’s Word. He is the founder and author for Mariners, a growing set of online Bible reading resources (www.marinersnotes.org). He is also on the staff of Alpha New Zealand.
He is married to Honor and they have two young adult sons. Martyn loves reading and nice cakes with cups of tea!
Crazy fact about Martyn - in the early days of email 20 years ago, Martyn once taught a brain surgeon how to use email!
Sunday 16th June, 6:30pm Can We Trust the Gospels?
The Gospels function as our primary source about the life of Jesus - what He did and said. But can we trust them? Can we have confidence in their historical credibility? Starting with no prior assumptions about the Gospels, this workshop will allow us to explore three dimensions of research:
• can we trust the original sources for the material?
• can we trust the way the first stories of Jesus were passed on over the years?
• can we trust the actual text of the Gospels as representing good history-writing?
Interactive and wide-ranging, this workshop will get you thinking as you engage with historical material to form your own conclusions.
Monday 17th June, 6:30pm Taking God’s Word for it
How come different people can read the same Bible passage, but arrive at divergent interpretations of its meaning? How can we read the Bible well, in ways that lead us to interpret God’s life-giving Word with confidence? Interactive and thought-provoking, this workshop offers four practical tools with worked examples to help us interpret the Bible well, whether we’re reading it individually or in a group setting.
Tuesday 18th June, 6:30pm Get into the Gospels!
This highly interactive workshop offers a tool for getting much more from our study of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke). Following a short introduction on the background to these Gospels, the main section of the workshop will involve worked examples of stories from the life of Jesus. This workshop will assist the way you read the Gospels either individually or in a group setting, helping you see more of Jesus.
Wednesday 19th June. 6:30pm Lifting the Lid – making sense of the book of Revelation
Let’s face it, the book of Revelation is one of the hardest books in the Bible to understand! Reading Revelation can leave us scratching our heads, somewhat worried, or both! How do we make sense of this most remarkable book? Martyn Day spent two years teaching through the entire book of Revelation at his church, the South Harbour Vineyard in Auckland. He is the author of Lifting the Lid, a Bible-reading series on the book of Revelation, available from his Mariners website of Bible-reading resources (www.marinersnotes.org). Interactive and thought-provoking, with worked examples, this workshop will offer a toolkit for how to read the book of Revelation faithfully.