This year’s Summit theme, “Intimacy: Return to God,” is encouraging students to look inward. Throughout the week and during each featured guest’s lecture, the focus will be on the relationships found in the book of Hosea.
Every year, ACU’s Summit brings scholars, church leaders and visitors to campus who are ready to engage in conversations that will challenge and encourage.
This year will be no different. Dr. Brady Bryce, director of ministry events and assistant professor of ministry in the Graduate School of Theology, said many ACU faculty and hundreds of volunteers work year round to organize Summit so everyone can come together and learn more about God.
Bryce is confident this year’s theme was the correct choice. The theme focuses on the story of Hosea which Bryce believes will bring up difficult topics and spur on conversations our society desperately needs to hear.
The story of Hosea is not a pretty one, nor was it ever meant to be, but as Bryce said, “Hosea is stunning.”
The book tells the story of God giving the prophet Hosea a command that radically changed his life.
“God commands Hosea to marry a prostitute. And that’s the story,” said Bryce. “And when you marry a prostitute you can guess what happens: there’s unfaithfulness, there’s heartbreak, there are children that don’t quite look like you.”
Bryce said one of the reasons this story will speak to so many people is that our society has come to cherish things that don’t lead to true intimacy.
“As I look at our society, we’ve so nurtured desire, we’ve so nurtured individualism and consumerism and technology and I’m just as bad as anybody,” Bryce said. “But that has become what we focus on rather than putting things in submission to God.”
Dr. John Willis, professor of Old Testament, will be teaching a class at Summit titled “The Knowledge of God in Hosea: To Know God is to Love God” and said he is excited about Summit and the learning opportunities it will provide.
“I think that the books of Hosea and Jeremiah are very important in the Bible. They are about the intimate, daily and personal relationship between God and his people,” said Willis. “And out of that comes a close relationship between husband and wife, parent and child and all people.”
Bryce said the subtitle, “Return to God,” is meant to help the listener understand that the intimacy that will be encouraged is not like what we experience in our day-to-day lives. Summit this year is not meant to be a marriage seminar, dating-relationship seminar or about human sexuality, though Bryce said all of those topics will be discussed.
Instead, Summit will focus on what Bryce believes is the most important and fundamental relationship in our lives – our relationship with God.
“Whenever we can look in the mirror and see ourselves in that place of faithlessness, it’s not intended to induce shame. Instead it really gives us another image of God and his faithfulness to us and what he’s willing to do,” said Bryce. “God breaks the law and stays in faithful relationship to his people. And that’s a pretty stunning picture of God.”
