Miller Avenue Lectureships – the first night

Every year in June, the Miller Avenue Church of Christ holds its annual lectureship series.  This year’s theme is evangelism.  The series kicked off last night. 

Josh Carter, who left everything in his home back east to start a church in the downtown San Francisco area, started us off.  He made great points, about how saying the gospel means “good news” in Greek while technically true was a significant understatement, and in a touching personal story compared the Gospel to an airplane that closes the distance between loved ones.

D.J. McKnight from San Diego, CA  who, in addition to being a strong pulpit preacher, happens to be especially effective at individual Bible study, concluded the evening.  In his opening remarks, he remembered the lectureship from many years ago (which we remembered well) where Dee Bowman and Ed Harrell were the speakers. He also used self-deprecating humor to explain that he could not possibly say anything new about Jesus interaction with the woman at the well in John 4. Then he proceeded to do just that, psychoanalyzing the interaction in a way we had not heard before. A note of humor, at one point D.J. was making a point that we need to give God proper weight in our lives. I could not resist whispering to my wife that “some of us have more weight to give than others.”