DEEP FAITH Week

DEEP FAITH 2013  |  Loving God With Heart & Mind

The plasticity of the human soul presents us with a most wonderful and terrible aspect of life: that
with every moment we give ourselves to forces that slowly transform us either into the beauty of
persons made new in the image of the invisible God, or into grotesque distortions of creatures in
whom God’s image is defaced. This is a sobering thought, and one of which we are not often
conscious. A. J. Gordon once wrote that “we become inevitably and insensibly assimilated to that
which most completely absorbs our time and attention.”(1) It is for this reason that we must make a
regular habit, both individually and collectively, of critically assessing what it is that absorbs our
time and attention and to invite the Holy Spirit to inspect our ways.

Our annual DEEP FAITH week is February 11-13, 2013. It will grant us an opportunity to do just
that. Through special morning and evening chapel services we will ask God to examine our
hearts and transform our minds, with the hope that our love of God and neighbor might be
revived. Over these days, we will as a community pray specifically that we would “know the
hope to which God has called us, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his
incomparably great power for us who believe”(Eph.3:18-19). Dr. Richard Mouw, President of
Fuller Seminary, and Rev. Dr. Clive Calver, Pastor of Walnut Hill Community Church in Bethel,
CT, will be with us to open the Scriptures, lead us in prayer and direct us towards a renewal of
loving God with all of our hearts, souls, strength and minds.

With words equally descriptive of our times as they were of his, Eberhard Arnold, founder of the
Bruderhof Community wrote: “These are times of distress. We cannot blindly retreat from the
problems overwhelming society. The only justification for turning inward from the confusing,
hectic world would be that, through unity with eternal powers, we gain a strength of character
ready to be tested in the stream of the world.” (2)

Why do we set aside time to pray during DEEP FAITH week? What is the value of withdrawing
from our routine activity in order to seek a more profound experience of God? It must be that in
so doing we are transformed more into the people whom God calls us to be, ones made in the
image of his Son, who shine like the lights amidst this current generation, and whose lives of love,
purity and service witness to the presence of God within the “stream of the world.”

1 Northfield Yearbook; For Each New Day, p.87, in Fifty-Eight A.J. Gordon Quotations, A.J. Gordon Heritage Project 2007

2 War; A Call to Inner Life, Words of Hope for Uncertain Times. The Plough Publishing House, 2002