Please join us on Saturday March 23rd 2019 in United Church, Cade Road, for Bible Month training via live streaming. This gathering will offer opportunities for small group discussions and to feed questions into the live event.

This will be the first time the regional team have live-streamed event -- a method the team hopes to continue to use given the widespread geography of the region -- therefore please consider this event a 'pilot'. The team will be learning from this event -- there may be glitches with the technology, with the connections, or it may all go to plan! Please be prepared to bear with the facilitators and learn with them -- and please be reassured that there will always be a Plan B!

Please bring your own lunch -- refreshments will be provided.

This event will be live streamed from Sailsbury Methodist Church.

Bible Month is an opportunity for churches and circuits to spend 30 days focused on a single biblical book. In 2019, Bible Month will focus on the epistle to the Colossians.

Bible Month involves two key elements:

1. Preachers preparing and preaching a series of sermons on Colossians over the four Sundays of June.
2. Small group leaders running a 'Bible Month' group that focuses on Colossians, but which also helps those attending engage the Bible in fresh and innovative ways.

By focusing on a single biblical book, the aim of a Bible Month is to help all in church engage more deeply with Scripture. Bible Month has proved to be a model which could be effective in raising biblical literacy, and the majority of those who have taken part in the past were keen to hold another Bible Month in the future!

The training days sits alongside the Bible Month Magazine and the resources available on the Methodist website, or through Methodist Publishing.

You can find out more about Bible Month here: http://www.methodist.org.uk/our-faith/the-bible/bible-month/

James Dunn, also known as Jimmy Dunn, will lead this training day.

James Dunn is a British New Testament scholar who was for many years the Lightfoot Professor of Divinity in the Department of Theology at the University of Durham, now Emeritus Lightfoot Professor. He has a PhD and DD from the University of Cambridge. In 2002-03, Dunn was the President of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, the principal international body for New Testament study. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

In 2004 a Festschrift was published dedicated to Dunn, comprising articles by 27 New Testament scholars, on The Holy Spirit and Christian Origins . In 2009 another Festschrift was dedicated to Dunn for his 70th birthday, on Jesus and Paul, consisting of two forewords by Richard B. Hays and N. T. Wright and 17 articles all written by his former students who went on to have successful careers in both academic and ministerial fields around the world.

Dunn is especially associated with the New Perspective on Paul, along with E. P. Sanders and N. T. Wright. Dunn has taken up Sanders' project of redefining Palestinian Judaism in order to correct the Christian view of Judaism as a religion of works-righteousness. One of the most important differences to Sanders is that Dunn perceives a fundamental coherence and consistency to Paul's thought. He furthermore criticizes Sanders' understanding of the term justification, arguing that Sanders' understanding suffers from an "individualizing exegesis".

He is a minister of the Church of Scotland and a Methodist local preacher and has worked broadly within the Protestant tradition.