Pastor Wes Lutes on the Fall Reading Plan
This semester, students and faculty at Lee University have engaged in the Fall Reading Plan, created by Pastor Wes Lutes and Campus Ministries.
The plan was set to last from Sept. through Dec. 1, structured to allow any person to join at any time. It includes weekly devotions, leaving Saturday and Sunday as makeup days if one has a busy week.
Lutes introduced the idea of this plan to the campus with the intention of providing community and accountability to fellow Christians.
“I believe as a community, faculty, staff, and students, we are to carry out faithful Christians. Christian witness, and part of that is embracing Christian disciplines like the community reading of scripture together,” says Lutes.
On a college campus where professors engage in devotions for their classes, Lutes also recognizes the formation of connections students can make between said classes over a shared reading plan topic for that day.
“What if we had some kind of a guide that had a regimented plan that they could follow that is approachable, that other professors are talking about, and hopefully it just naturally kind of spurs conversation about scripture … you go from one class about environmental science and then you go to a class about nursing but both of the professors are mentioning something they're learning from that passage of scripture,” says Lutes.
Lutes and his team decided to center this semester’s plan around the Acts of the Apostles, Galatians, and 1st and 2nd Thessalonians.
“We landed on kind of a burden for returning to the ancient way of following Jesus as a Christian community, and the Acts of the Apostles and these early epistles help move us and remind us of what is important about our community witness,” says Lutes.
The plan connects people across classrooms and buildings.
“Faculty will come up to me at the end of the semester and say, ‘Hey, Wes, thank you for putting that together. That was very useful in both my personal devotion and my classroom kind of devotion time,’” Lutes said.
Campus Ministries crafts a new reading plan every semester, and it is open to all. Access the plan on Lee University’s website.
Photo by Emma Sargent.
