The Story of Jesus & The Story of God

The Luke series we'll launch after Easter (see posts from March 8-11,20,21) will not be The Story of Jesus series I had originally proposed. I want to explain my thinking on this.

When we did The Story of God in seven weeks, a few people shared that it went too fast and skipped too much. Some people wished it had gone eight weeks (I agree), and others thought 10 or more weeks (I don't agree). In my opinion, ten or more weeks would have lost the sense of the whole Bible and the redemptive story line. My goal was that everyone would come away knowing how it all fits together, and I believe that a longer series would have mitigated against that.

I also believe that seven (or eight) weeks was optimal and sufficient if people participated in all three learning experiences--messages, story-formed way in the small groups and the reading guide. I'm still convinced of that, and I know that people who invested the time came away with great dividends. There was a direct correlation between the impact of the series and investment as I read through over 300 cards telling me of your participation and its impact.

But I also hoped that people would come away hungry for more. And I think we achieved that in the seven weeks we had.

I want to do a Story of Jesus series that accomplishes many of the same goals as the Story of God series. But after reading the poll results, I felt it was too soon for that. I felt that too many of you were indeed hungry for more and doing an overview series was not the way to feed that hunger.

So the Story of Jesus will wait. It should last no longer than eight weeks or it will lose the forest for the trees. But I will plan on doing it before too long. Maybe it would be a great way of wrap up the big lessons learned in Luke. We'll see. But before long, if God wills, we'll do The Story of Jesus.