Acts to Revelation: Sacred Community & Prophetic Vision

Come curious. That’s enough.

Thursdays, October 1, 8, 15
4:00pm–7:00pm Central
Live on Zoom

What happened after the Gospel stories ended?

In these sessions, we’ll journey from Jerusalem to Patmos, exploring the emergence of the early Jesus movement through Acts, the letters of the New Testament, and Revelation. We’ll follow the first communities of Jesus followers, travel alongside Paul and his companions, encounter the conflicts and questions facing these new communities, and finally enter the strange, politically charged, symbol-rich world of Revelation.

We’ll read these texts in their historical worlds and through the various interpretative lenses. Asking not only What might this have meant then? but also What does this text ask us to notice now? Along the way, we’ll wrestle with what happens when historical context and metaphysical interpretation illuminate one another—and what can get lost when we neglect either one.

And we cannot tell the story of early Christianity without its women.

Women funded the movement, opened their homes, hosted and led communities, taught theology, carried messages, worked alongside Paul, and helped make the spread of the early church possible. Yet many of their names, roles, and authority have been minimized, misunderstood, or nearly erased from the story we inherited. We’ll bring these women back into the center of the narrative—not as an interesting sidebar, but as essential participants in the formation of the early Christian movement.

$125 SEE Credit Student (includes credit fee)
$80 Noncredit Student

From the communal experiments of Acts to Paul’s complicated letters to the resistance literature of Revelation, these writings raise questions that remain startlingly contemporary:

Who belongs?
Who gets to lead?
How does a community live its convictions?
What happens when spiritual vision collides with power?
And how do ancient sacred texts continue to speak without requiring us to pretend they say things they do not?

This course meets the educational requirements for Unity S.E.E. students, but you do not need to be an S.E.E. student—or even particularly comfortable with the Bible—to participate.

The class is open to anyone curious about Christian Scripture, its history, its metaphysical possibilities, and the communities that gave it life.