Essentials of Faith. If you wrote a list of essentials of faith, what would it include? Worship, Catechism, The Bible, fellow believers? Just as each of us learn in an individualized way to read, or write, or do math, so we each learn about Faith in our own way. But the Bible is a central piece of that. God gave us a legacy of documents (yes, they were individual documents before they were compiled) and we have learned about Faith and God and ourselves from them for thousands of years. This statement has a lot of ‘weight’ to it, though, doesn’ t it? I meet people all the time who are so intimidated by the enormity of the Bible that they have never gotten the bravery together to study the Bible, or even read it for pleasure. And, in my experience, folks ‘build a wall’ of their own perceived inadequacies as far as the Bible, and keep their distance from the Bible as though it had an electric fence around it. That’s too bad. Continue reading “Lutheranism 101 – The Bible”