Go forth with JOY

Sunday, January 20:  Today marked our very last LOGOS class, a small group at Calvary Church I've been a part of since 2005. The class has been a wonderful place of fellowship, study, and prayer for longer than 2005--but that's when we were invited to come and visit the class, so we did, and then we stayed.

For the last dozen or so years, Nigel (pictured below with his sweet wife, Gayla) has been our main teacher. We've taken books of the Bible and studied them chapter by chapter. Nigel has the gift of teaching and additionally, he has a heart for people, for God, for the Truth, and he works hard at his teaching. Sir Nigel (our nickname for his esteemed) also teaches Biology and other sciences over at Cornerstone University.

 I have loved our class. I love studying the Bible and I love engaging with good teaching, being challenged to delver deeper to apply the truth to everyday living. Prior to our Grace Beyond project at Calvary, we probably had about 14-18 regular attending folk at our class. With the building project, however, came our displacement at our building for almost a year and the necessity to find other places to meet. We seemed to survive that as a class, but many core members moved on for various reasons and never returned to us.

In the last few months, we really had to assess our numbers and the time Nigel spent preparing the week's study, etc. Added to that was the fact that he was elected to be a deacon, AND also that his teaching environment was greatly enhanced by the new science building out at Cornerstone, affording him much more opportunity for research, etc. We put out a survey email to everyone in class, prayed about the future of LOGOS, and it was believed by all of us that God was leading us to "disband" (I can't think of another word) our class and see what else He had in mind for each of us individually.

So Sunday was our last class time. Gayla ordered up a beautiful cake, I brought some home-baked cookies, and we enjoyed fellowship and prayer together as we said our good-byes. 

"Go out in joy and be led forth in peace ..." Isaiah 55:12   We intend to do just that!