A 90-minute webinar presented by Cynthia Rigby
Click here to purchase the on-demand webinar – $29.95 (1-6 participants) On-demand webinars can be viewed by registered participants at any convenient time and as many times as is helpful.
Click here to order the DVD – $43.95 (free shipping)
Remember when we were children, and it seemed like Christmas would never come? Now we might feel like it comes way too often! I have neighbors who don’t even bother taking down their outdoor holiday lights. “It feels like we’d just have to put them right back up again,” they explain. And pastors are often similarly apathetic about gearing up for the season, working hard to be motivated and innovative even when their hearts are not in it.
What new thing can be said? Should we even wish, somehow, to get back to our sense of childhood anticipation and wonder? Or is that just not the way of the spiritually seasoned adult?
What will this webinar cover? This webinar will be devoted to inviting us, again, into the surprises and wonders of Christmas. How do we listen afresh to a story we have long known by heart? What is it that surprises us? What content of the message can spiral us into wonderment? How are we surprised – and then changed – in ways that lean into showing love to the world?
Some of the things we will be surprised by are: the requirement of repentance (what does that look like in our world, in 2015?), the scandalous character of the cross (really? The Word became flesh in one particular individual?), and the promise that, somehow, meeting the babe-born-of-Mary will fill us again with the first love we had for God.
Who should attend? Pastors, worship committees, music directors, Christian educators, seminary students… and anyone who wants to keep learning about their “first love” for God.
After the webinar, participants will be prepared to:
- Articulate at least two “big ideas” about why the event of Christmas is so surprising and wondrous.
- Identify biblical texts, theological ideas, cultural dynamics and other resources that can continue to be studied and explored in the weeks following the webinar.
- Find renewed motivation to enter Advent repentantly and with joy.
Click here to purchase the demand webinar – $29.95 (1-6 participants)
Click here to order the DVD – $43.95 (free shipping)
If you have a group larger than 6, please contact Jana Blazek for group pricing.
CYNTHIA RIGBY is professor of theology at Austin Theological Seminary. She is the author of “The Promotion of Social Righteousness” and co-author of “Blessed One: Protestant Perspectives on Mary.”