Many people have helped keep CtK running smoothly while Pastor Nate is on sabbatical. Thank you for all of your hard work! Super sermons, great music, fun campfires, and an office staff keeping it all together! Our flowers outside are beautiful and the mowing teams are keeping our grounds maintained. I feel our musicians are right on with the music being played everyone is "on top" of everything, including several funerals. GREAT JOB!
Two of the things Pastor Nate is going to do on sabbatical is study Dietrich Bonhoeffer and go to Holden Village. Let me share a little about Dietrich Bonhoeffer but I must first give a disclaimer that many of the things I have written are taken from my resources. I cannot say these important points as succinctly as the authors who wrote them.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a renowned and beloved Christian minister, seminary professor, and theologian who was imprisoned and later executed by the Nazis’s for his resistance to Hitler. His bestselling classics are The Cost of Discipleship, Life Together, and Letters and Papers from Prison. ( These books aren’t always easy to read so I’m looking forward to hearing what Pastor Nate will have to share.) It’s been said “Bonhoeffer’s writings are a treasure of spiritual wisdom, social conscience, pastoral care, and theological insights that are an inspiration to us all, no matter what challenges we face”.
As we at CtK look at our post covid church one of Bonhoeffer’s concepts caught my eye. Cheap Grace. To sum up cheap grace Bonhoeffer states "it is grace represented as the church’s inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits.. Grace has been paid in advance and because it has everything can be had for nothing, ie grace without discipleship. The reverse is costly grace which calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner." I can’t wait to find out more from Pastor
The following is a Holden Village Prayer which I found in one of my “good stuff” files. Pastor Nate said it it is used as people leave the Village for home.
LORD GOD, who has called us your servants to ventures of which we
> cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden and through perils unknown, GIVE US FAITH to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ, Our Lord. AMEN.
Let it be for all of us, and our church as we face the future. Sue Kerzisnik
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