Teaching Ministries

There are many educational opportunities at ERC including Bible education on Sunday morning. These are some of the educational offerings currently and from the recent past.

• The adult Sunday school class is currently studying the book of Psalms. We will be using Tremper Longman's book, How to Read the Psalms to support our study.

  Our overall purpose for the class to gain a greater knowledge of the character and person of God to enhance our piety and stimulate our love for God. Such characteristics as God's goodness, sovereignty, holiness, wrath, lovingkindness, mercy, power, majesty, transcendence (in balance with him being imminent) are constant themes throughout the Psalms. We will take this knowledge of God gained from scripture and correctly apply it to our lives.

  We will accomplish this by enhancing our knowledge and factual content on the Psalms by having a greater understanding of the hermeneutical principles for the Psalms (Hebrew poetry, imagery, parallelism, etc.) and scripture in general. This would include looking at what is normally classified as background material such as author, history, geography, and culture. In addition, consideration will also be given to other material such as date, place in canon, titles, etc. Use of Tremper Longman's book, How to Read the Psalms, will assist in providing much of this material.

  The class will go through June 2009.

  "More and more is the conviction forced upon my heart that every man must traverse the territory of the Psalms himself if he would know what a goodly land they are. They flow with milk and honey, but not to strangers; they are only fertile to lovers of their hills and vales. None but the Holy Spirit can give a man the key to the Treasury of David; and even he gives it rather to experience than to study. Happy he who for himself knows the secret of the Psalms." C.H. Spurgeon, Treasury of David, vol. 2, preface.

• The film series called "Foundations, An Overview of Systematic Theology" a sixty week course by Dr. R. C. Sproul. was completed in May 2008.
• "20 Controversies That Almost Killed a Church" taught by Roland Robinson
• Addictions: Finding Hope in the Power of the Gospel taught by Pastor Rich Hamlin.
• "My Father's World" taught by Roland Robinson
• "Apologetics: Defending the Truth" taught by Pastor Rich Hamlin.
• Mortifying Sin: The Enemy Within taught by Paster Rich Hamlin. The link takes you to the handouts and allows you to print the handout that you seem to have misplaced.
• Essential Truths of the Christian Faith taught by Roland Robinson.
• The text used in a class on church history was Trial and Triumph, Stories From Church History by Richard M. Hannula. The class handouts, Historical Highlights of the Christian Church, are still very useful both as a timeline of church history, and a summary of the signifance of some really big words that theologians sometimes use.