Test Driving Theology

Picture it for a minute. White buildings stacked down a cliff on Santorini, with the Aegean Sea going on forever below them. Olive trees on a hillside. Water so blue that it doesn’t even look like like a real color. Long tables, good food, and no particular hurry about any of it. The Mediterranean has been drawing people to its shores for thousands of years, and it has not lost its touch.

Now add this. The places we will walk through are the places where the church first learned how to be the church.

Next October, a group of us from Trinity is going to Greece for eleven days, and I get to lead the trip. Some of the names on the itinerary will sound familiar the moment you hear them, because you have been hearing them read aloud on Sunday mornings your whole life. Thessalonica. Philippi. Corinth. Those are not just addresses in the back of your Bible. They were real towns full of ordinary people figuring out what it meant to follow Jesus without a single thing we take for granted. No buildings. No hymnals. No committees. No idea whether any of it would last.

It lasted. We are the proof of that.

Here is where we are going. We begin in Thessaloniki, travel to Philippi and Kavala, then on to Veria and the monasteries of Meteora, which sit on top of stone pillars hundreds of feet in the air. We visit Delphi, and then spend time in Athens, with the Acropolis, the Parthenon, and Mars Hill.

Then we board a ship for three nights in the islands: Mykonos, Ephesus on the coast of Turkey, Patmos, Crete, and Santorini. Patmos is where Revelation was written. Santorini is the one on every postcard, and it earns it. We come ashore and finish at Corinth before flying home from Athens.

One more thing I want you to know.

Something happens to people who travel together. You eat together. You get turned around on a street corner together. You are tired at the same time. You help each other up the hill. Somewhere around the fourth day the conversations get honest, and people who have sat six pews apart for fifteen years finally learn each other’s stories. That is not a bonus feature of this trip. That is part of the point.

This trip is open to the whole congregation. You do not need to be a Bible scholar. You do not need to have traveled overseas before. You do not need to be a certain age or a certain kind of person. If you are curious, you are qualified.

We are holding three informational meetings, and each one covers the same material, so come to whichever fits your schedule:

• Wednesday, October 14, at 6:00pm
• Saturday, October 17, at 9:00am
• Monday, October 19, at 6:00pm

At those gatherings we will walk through the full itinerary, the cost, the payment schedule, and what a day on the ground actually looks like. Bring your questions, especially the practical ones. Bring your spouse, or a friend who is thinking it over alongside you. There is no commitment in showing up to listen.

October of 2027 sounds far away. It is not, really. Trips like this get planned slowly and then arrive all at once, and the people who end up going are usually the ones who took one small step early.

Come take that step with us.

In God’s grace,
Pastor Todd