Salted cookies, secret giving and sowing seeds

…are just some of the fruits of this fall’s Manuscript study.

We have spent this fall studying Matthew 5-7, the Sermon on the Mount, and this year we (my staff partner and our student Ieadership team) hoped to see students more actively living out the application of the Scripture.

So we thought through how we could apply the Scripture with a combination of thought provoking questions, simple illustrative activities, and tangible take-home challenges. Here’s a quick summary:
week one: We wrote out the Beatitudes in our own words.
week two: During our study we invited students to have a piece of gum that lost its flavour quickly. Then we gave the students a salted chocolate cookie which they ate and found delicious, after which we gave them a second cookie to give away (and left it open to see how they would go about doing that).
week three: We gave each person a plastic plate and invited them to write with a marker a word or phrase to represent something they needed to release to God. Then had them dip their plate in a bowl of water and as it washed away see it as a symbol of God’s forgiveness.
week four: We discussed what it would look like if we actually followed through with the words that we say and the good intentions that we have.
week five: We engaged in a prayer mapping activity to help us love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.
week six: We encouraged students to “give in secret” by choosing to give and serve sacrificially.
week seven: Using the Lord’s Prayer, as a model, we spent some time interceding for each other and the campus.
week eight: We sent the students out to try a new prayer practice to help release anxiety.
week nine: After studying about not judging others, we spent some time reflecting on places where we have been too judgmental and working through the next steps toward repentance and where possible making restitution.
week nine: Through a different prayer mapping activity, we invited students to map out an answered prayer, making note of whether or not God answered in the ways we expected. Then we invited them to ASK God for something big, holding it open-handed to the ways God may answer it or in the timing He takes to do so.
week ten: After spending some time reviewing all the ways God has spoken to us through this sermon, we sent the students out with a packet of herb seeds so that they could grow in their understanding of how things grow (and better understand Jesus’ use of growing imagery) and also bless others with the herbs they grow, so that the impact of our study group goes beyond those participating in the study.

There are so many stories to share about how God has been working in the lives of these students who have gathered to study scripture with us, but here are just a handful:
• a student who is brand new to our community chose to: share the gospel for the first time to a stranger on the GO train (after giving that person a cookie), give his time sacrificially to serve his church, invite his friends to come to bible study, learn how to lead a manuscript study and co-led a study with me, and be actively involved in our community even though he has a long commute home!
• In fact, I found out in week seven, that half of the students who regularly attended our tuesday study chose to stay on campus for the study even though their classes ended hours earlier and they would then commute home to Pickering, Brampton, Scarborough, Markham or Mimico after the study during rush hour!
• Two students would come downtown just for the study (from Mimico and Markham) on days they didn’t need to come downtown for class! One of these students told me, ‘well, I would come downtown for a two-hour class, so I’m willing to come downtown for this’.
• And there have been so many encouraging stories of how the students have been actively choosing to love and serve their friends, family, roommates, and classmates in sacrificial ways coming out of choosing to apply this Scripture! Praise God!