CMED Course – Trusting God in troubled times: Digging into the text of Isaiah

with Revd Howard Peskett

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good tidings, who publishes peace, who brings good tidings of good, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns!”

Whenever I read these words I think of a missionary friend who told me that they first came home to his heart when he buried a young Cambodian boy by the side of a track near a refugee camp in Thailand; the boy had died after becoming sick when he returned to his country during the Khmer Rouge times to tell the people in his village about Jesus.

In this workshop we will dig into the text of six exhilarating chapters of Isaiah, in the very heart of the book, chapters 50 to 55.  Isaiah is not the longest book of the Old Testament (there are five books which are longer); but it is the most quoted in the New Testament (412 times, according to my computation from my Greek New Testament).  The chapters we will study include the most famous of the five Servant Songs in Isaiah; the text of a famous sermon by William Carey which was hugely significant at the beginning of the modern Western missionary movement; and two unforgettable chapters about the character and the mission of the church.

Because every day we are deluged with information pouring into our house through the postbox and electronically, we are forced to “surf” through all this material, selecting what interests us or what matters. There is a danger that we bring this surfing mindset to our bible-reading also.  We can see similar behavior if we visit an art gallery – there are many people who hurry past the pictures, giving them a cursory glance.  But connoisseurs (and devotees) enjoy every intricate detail; they sit and stare; and then stand up and look again from a different angle; then they go away and come back again….

In this workshop we will pay close attention to Isaiah’s words, which have not lost their resonance although written long ago.  Through this calm attentiveness we will refresh our souls for ministry and mission; and we will receive help to go on trusting God through troubled times.

 Howard Peskett is a retired priest living in Penzance, formerly the Dean of the Discipleship Training Centre in Singapore; the Vice Principal of Trinity College Bristol; the Rural Dean of Penwith.  He has spent a lifetime encouraging men and women, in Asia and in the UK, to believe that they can themselves discover the meaning and the wonder of the Bible as they seek to love and follow Christ.

10am Coffee, 10.30am Start, 4pm Finish

Click here to book a place.