It’s up! If you missed the training day on December 1st, you can now catch the audio here and view the training manual, too.  

From the MH Women’s Training Day, December 1, 2007:

Training Manual - This is a PDF of the day’s print material for the lectures.

Session 1: What is Theology and Why Do I Care? - Wendy Alsup builds the foundation for the day by clearly defining ‘theology’ as the study of God. She reminds us that any hope we have for change and transformation is rooted in our knowledge of God — that looking to His face to know him is our first duty and delight.

Session 2: God is our Father - Crystal Munson discusses the first person of the Trinity - God our Father.

Session 3: God is our Savior - Kelly Cowan teaches on the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Session 4: God is our Help - Amy Lockman shares on the Holy Spirit and His role in our lives as a comforter, counselor and helper.

Session 5: What Do I Do Now? - Wendy Alsup closes the training day with a teaching on how to practically apply knowledge of God into each life situation — taking every thought captive and making it submit to the mind of Christ.

Want to hear Pastor Mark answer your questions? 

If you haven’t yet, you have 1.5 days left to ask him anything!

At 5 p.m. PST, on November 1st, no new questions can be added, and the top 50 will go to the ‘next round’ of voting.

 So it’s a slim chance to get in the top 50, but maybe you can vote on a question already there you’d like to know the answer to.

 Fast facts:

1. You get 10 votes a day. (that’s 20 possible votes left!)
2. You can vote for the same question multiple times.
3. Click “show more” so you can see the other questions besides the top 10, or look at them all.
4. If you want to vote for the same question more than once, try clicking on the text of the question itself, which will reload the page. Then vote from there multiple times so you don’t keep having to scroll to find your question.
5. If you start typing a question, text links will automatically appear trying to find ’similar questions’ to yours - it’s an easier and faster search for something to vote on.

My question opinions and highlights:

I wrote this question because (more…)

This is your friendly reminder to register for the upcoming Women’s Training Day on December 1st! You barely have a month!

It’s called “Who is Our God?” which sounds pretty all-encompassing and ethereal perhaps, but believe me - it’s solid, practical and specific Bible teaching for the ladies.

These events have always been very encouraging to me, personally, and they are good for women who have been Christians forever, or just recently. They are also good for women who have been around Mars Hill for a long time and those who just set foot for the first time last week.

If you’ve been wishing you could hear good Bible teaching from a woman, come out for this event.

Read details and register here.

Hello ladies -

this is a quickie, but I have updated the calendar with some info on upcoming Women’s events here at Mars Hill.

The registration isn’t up yet, but I will keep you posted. For now, save the dates!

Hey, guess what? We have been compiling links to teaching that is especially relevant to us ladies, whether the teaching is from women’s events or the Sunday pulpit.

Where? Look to the right (more…)

If you are interested in better understanding Jesus in the Old Testament, there’s an important event on the Mars Hill calendar for you.

On October 6 at the Ballard Campus, a course called “Emmaus Road: Seeing Christ in all of Scripture” will be offered.

Luke 24:27 “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he [Jesus] interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself”

Just as Jesus taught the disciples on the Emmaus Road after His resurrection to see himself in the Old Testament, this class will lay the foundation of the overarching Biblical story, studying Jesus in the Old Testament and our role within God’s story.

This Saturday seminar is a great opportunity to grow in your knowledge of Jesus and to gain a broader view and respect for the story of God found within the Old and New Testament. Come by yourself, with your Community Group, or with your family for this valuable teaching seminar.

Here’s the link to register.

Calling all the smarty-pants, puzzle-loving women of Seattle!

Time for a break from the serious, seriously.

So the following picture is a conglomeration… of 7 photos. Of 7 establishments… you guess the neighborhood.

First LADY to post a comment here correctly identifying 4 or more of the neon-letters’ respective business names WINS a FABULOUS PRIZE.*

Seriously.

So get crackin’. It’s a great day for a walk through Ballard!

* ‘fabulous’ is defined as ‘from Archie McPhee.’ If that isn’t fabulous, I don’t know WHAT is.

Everybody knows that they’re guilty
Everybody knows that they’ve lied
Everybody knows that they’re guilty
Resting on their conscience eating their inside
It’s freedom, said it’s freedom time now
.
Our present condition needs serious recognition
Where there’s no repentence there can be no remission
.
His word has nailed everything to the tree
severing all of me from all that I used to be

- Lauryn Hill, “Freedom Time”

While the nation is preparing for a celebration of its political freedom, we here at the blog are ushering in our own revolution - a sexual one that looks nothing like our mothers’ revolution in the 60’s.

This week, on the Reforming the Feminine blog, we will be discussing sexual sin. Why? Because most if not all of us have sexual sin to deal with. While historically a lot of that has been sin against us, as a nice little result of our mothers’ sexual revolution we are now also dealing with all those issues that used to be typically defined as “men’s issues” - ie, addiction to pornography, masturbation and the like. We are dealing with everything from date rape or an uncle’s inappropriate ‘hugs’ to our own addictions to sexually graphic novels and promiscuity.

And bad sex is killing us. It’s eating our hearts up. It’s filling our minds with thoughts that won’t shut up. It’s diseasing our bodies. It’s telling us we are filthy and disgusting underneath it all. That there is no hope, and we better not tell anyone. 

I’m mad as hell right now. I thought I would be bemusedly detached from this whole topic, but just this last week, a woman very dear to me burst into raging tears of shame as she confessed her sexual sin to me, for the first time ever to another human being. It enraged me that she was so entrapped and so alone and so full of shame. She is a beautiful woman and I know that Jesus loves her and that she is not filthy and disgusting; yet she feels so trapped and out of control. I want to lunge at Satan’s jugular for all the lies that he has gleefully tucked into her heart.

The weird part is that while I am angry for her, I am excited at the same time. The first step to freedom is exposure. That goes for all of us. Someone turn a light on! What is this stuff?!

On Saturday, July 14th, there will be an event called “Redeeming Female Sexuality” at Mars Hill. If you are a woman, you’re invited. This is not just for those of us who have big dramatic stories. We’re all dealing with sexual issues, so let’s stop trying to fight the darkness alone… let’s meet one another in love and compassion, to learn and confess and fight this together, with Jesus leading the way.

Due to the sensitive nature of the event, it will not be recorded, so I encourage you to make every effort to come and benefit from the testimonies and teaching available on the 14th only.

In the meantime, stay tuned to Reforming the Feminine as we discuss sexuality this week.

Please click on the link above for the event description and a link to register, or just click on the Calendar tab of this blog.

“This person Jesus I am utterly fascinated with this man. I don’t know the significance of the crucifixion and the resurrection. I’m workin’ on that. I’m studying. But I do feel that he carried God and that what he preached was totally revolutionary, and it’s totally what we need now. I mean the most revolutionary statement anyone could make is “love thy neighbor as thyself’ whew, man! If we could live what he taught, everything would change. But it ain’t what goes by the name of Christianity right now.” Jane Fonda

(Rolling Stone Magazine, online audio interview and as quoted in The Week vol. 7, iss. 310)

Jane Fonda. What an interesting woman. Sex symbol. Women’s health and exercise guru. Anti-war political activist. I have to say I am drawn to her as a strong, woman-leading-women with a lot of influence.

I will presume expertise neither in the publicly acknowledged facts of Ms. Fonda’s life and career, nor the state of her heart. And I want to be careful what I say about her in my ignorance. She is my sister, created and loved by God.

I will tell you that when I was very young, her name was associated with not only exercise and fitness, but other names of Blonde Women that Are Undermining Traditional Christian American Morals and Values in Our Men, like Madonna and Marilyn Monroe. That was back in the day when I wrote in my wide-ruled journal that I was cheering for any team that played AGAINST the Razorbacks, since they were Bill Clinton’s favorite team, and, as all us good, godly conservative Christians knew, Bill Clinton was the pawn of the devil.

Yikes. I epitomized what Ms. Fonda gently-yet-deftly critiques among the culturally mainstream Christians in America looking and acting nothing like Christ. Of course, in that classic Christian-kid’s coming-of-age “rebellion’, I discovered I like a lot of Madonna’s music, think Marilyn Monroe was a beautiful woman with a tragic ending, and . . .  I am intrigued by Jane Fonda’s conversion to Christianity. And more recently, her words on Jesus as quoted in The Week from her interview in Rolling Stone this month. (The quote above is a conglomeration of her audio interview and her written one as posted in May 18th’s The Week magazine).

I listened to the brief portion of her interview about her spirituality (it’s the last clip of the five listed on Rolling Stone’s website). While there were statements that my legalistic heart (prone to raise hell over theological discrepancies) jumped out at, overall I was enchanted to hear Ms. Fonda share her fascination with the man Jesus. She seems pleasantly surprised to see how “radical” and different Jesus is in the Bible from the Jesus projected by mainline Christianity. I love her “outsider” viewpoint on this. I wish more people would pick up the Bible and read about Jesus instead of just hearing what everyone else is paraphrasing for the third or twelfth time.

After finishing listening to her interview excerpt, I realized there were two ways I could go with her thoughts and statements. The first one was to freak out that she says things like “I was studying with someone for whom the Bible is literally word of God. and I had to stop because I began to feel this precious reverence.disappear. So I began to study on my own” or “If God is male, then men are God, and women are less than.” And I could ramp up all my arguments for why things are in the Bible the way they are, etc. I could say, “yes, God is not gendered, since he preceded gender, but he has chosen to reveal himself as male and a Father” and go on about the Mesopotamian norms that would have made it very culturally acceptable for a female deity, and that it is not proof of a God fashioned in our cultural preferences and now archaic, blah blah blah.

The other path was to stay focused on Jesus. Which I have only recently begun to do in all aspects of my life, rather than just the ideological. Here, listening to Jane’s interview, I am delighted to know that Jesus has caught her eye. That the Word of God in flesh speaks to Ms. Fonda. That she is enchanted with him. And lift up prayers that he continue to pursue her and reveal himself to her as she studies to ascertain “the significance of the crucifixion and the resurrection.” And to accept correction from a woman that my conservative Christian roots look at with scornful and prideful eyes so unlike Jesus they make me ashamed. To follow her example and become fascinated by the revolutionary life and work of Jesus and to take it one step beyond where she’s at and thank him for revealing to ME the significance of the crucifixion and the resurrection. To repent for losing sight of HIM and replacing my Jesus with pride-inducing, impeccable & mind-bound theology and self-righteousness.

Reforming the Feminine. You’re invited to join a handful of Mars Hill women as they exchange their ashes for beauty, fear for strength, mourning for gladness, filth for purity. This is where all that stuff we hear in church and read from our Bibles and know about Jesus in our heads… finds its way into the moments when we’re stuck in traffic, annoyed at work, can’t find our kids at the park, and we feel unloveable and stupid. This is the battlefield of the old woman vs. the new woman. Who will win? It could be ugly. It could be hilarious. It will definitely be humbling… but:

“He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it.” (Phil. 1:6)

And who are these women writing? They’ll do a better job introducing themselves soon, but let me give you the brief…

Candice recently joined Mars Hill Church through the Doxa West Seattle church changeover, is also recently married, and recently re-discovered her faith. She regularly attends the Ballard campus and ministers with the worship department.

Wendy Alsup is a deacon at Mars Hill Church who has attended for several years and manages much of Women’s Ministry and teaches women’s Capstone classes and at women’s events. She regularly attends the West Seattle campus with her husband and two sons.

Hannah is a new member and a recent graduate of Whitworth with a degree in Communications. She enjoys academic and social research and is a great writer and thinker. She regularly attends the Ballard campus.

Cambria is a member of Mars Hill Church regularly attending the Ballard campus. She is currently an instructor of fashion design at two post-secondary schools in Seattle and operates her own business providing personal assistant services to clients whose business ranges from real estate to fashion styling. 

Laurel is a Washington State native, though only more recently from Seattle. She was raised as a homeschooler, and never met Jesus until a few years ago. She is the only Christian in her family currently, and she possesses a fresh perspective on Christianity that a lot of us “church kids” lack. Laurel regularly attends the Ballard campus.

And I’m Adriel Ifland, this blog’s administrator. I’ve been attending Mars Hill Church for 2 years and am a Seattle native. I work at a missions organization, but am often spending spare time at Mars Hill, helping with the Breakfast Club, sound, or anywhere else that needs help. I recently became a deacon and regularly attend the Ballard campus.

Who’s up first? Look for something from Deacon Wendy Alsup tomorrow…