For twelve Sundays running from September 8th to November 24th, BMC’s worship series will explore familiar and unfamiliar biblical prophets. Much more than just practitioners of prediction, biblical prophets were complex, creative men and women who used everything from music, poetry, speech-acts, community arbitration, judicial smarts, and military advice to relay God’s word to God’s people and to the surrounding nations. This series will aim to cover 3 basic components related to prophets:
1. The Prophet’s Story – Based on whatever information we have. Sometimes there is very little in the way of biographical details for a given prophet but there is usually something to go on.
2. The Prophet’s Time and Place – Related to # 1 above is time and context. Many of the prophets are recorded to have lived and spoken throughout the Northern and Southern kingdoms of Israel in the difficult years of the 8th, 7th, and 6th centuries BCE. These times were difficult because of the many political, religious, and social forms of unrest and war that were occurring or threatening at the time.
3. The Prophet’s Message and its possible relevance to us today. Certainly, our own context of warring nations, social injustice and unrest, displaced peoples, and economic inequality place us in relatable contexts to the prophets, even acknowledging the great distance between our history and theirs. Sometimes the relevance of a prophet’s message today will be clear. Other times, it may be important to state why a given prophet’s approach/message may not be relevant in our own time and place today.