Spurgeon Sabbatical

I arrived in Boston on Monday to attend the Spurgeon Sabbatical at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (my alma mater). It's Thursday, so I'm at the start of the third full day. We're meeting for worship each morning at 8:45 and then moving into a study of Romans from about 9:30 - noon. So far we've covered about the first 7 verses.

We're working through a lot of the material in Greek and it's been really invigorating and exciting to study at this level again. It's about 30 hours of content altogether, so it's like a full seminary course (but without the grading and papers!).

So far one of the more interesting issues has been how to understand the phrase "obedience of faith" in vs. 5. The theme of obedience creeps up in Romans more than you'd think at first glance. We've been talking a lot about how obedience is an organic expression of our faith.

After class, we meet for lunch and a pastor will take a turn sharing some of his life story and then we pray for him. We have time off in the afternoons then reconvene around 5:30 for dinner followed by more pastoral reflections about issues in our churches. Then we conclude with worship in the evening by about 9:30.

I made it over to Manchester, MA yesterday afternoon, which was where Deb and I lived when we were here. Took a walk on singing beach, which is a great little place to see the ocean here.

The weather however has been typical New England stuff. I haven't seen the sun yet. It's been foggy, drizzly, and cool since I got here. Yesterday, the car was telling me the temperature was 59 as I was driving around.