Lent Course 2012 – The Way to Freedom
This year’s Lent course begins in Church on Wednesday 29th February at 7.30 pm. It is, of course, a leap year and this day seems an appropriate one on which to leap into a Lent course! We have chosen to follow the course provided by Churches Together in Britain and Ireland. There will be more detail next month but here is a brief taster. At the moment we are planning to run the course only in the evening. If there is sufficient demand we may also be able to repeat it during the day. Please speak to Nigel or Celia. Every other year we hold a Deanery Lent course and this is the year. The same course is therefore available in a variety of places: Mondays at 2.00 pm in Benhall Church Schoolroom, Mondays at 7.30 pm in Saxmundham Church Hall (or other venues!), and there is an alternative Lent course with different material in Leiston and in Yoxford Church (please see details elsewhere in Pew News).
The Deanery Lent course, which we are offering in Aldeburgh, is based on a poem by Dietrich Bonhoeffer called Stations on the Way to Freedom. It was written in prison in 1944. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor and theologian, was executed by the Nazis for his role in the resistance to Hitler within a month of the end of the war. In 1932 he had said, “To be free is to be in love, is to be in the truth of God. The one who loves because made free by the truth of God, is the most revolutionary person on earth.” His last recorded words when being taken away for his final trial and execution were, “This is the end - for me the beginning of life.”
The four verses of Bonhoeffer’s poem are used as the jumping-off points to reflect on the quest for freedom in our own experience, the life of our churches, and what’s going on in our society and the world today – and all in the light of our reading of the Bible.
On 29th February our introductory week takes the theme, What is freedom? Jesus said: ‘You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free’. How does this square with