“Saintly Smackdown.” “Ash Thursday.”The Round of Saintly Kitsch.” These phrases either made you wonder what kind of unstable, tacky Lent we observe here at ChurchNext or they made you nod wisely and wonder what’s the next matchup in Lent Madness. Lent Madness, the online devotional tool sponsored by Forward Movement, has been growing in popularity steadily since its inception in 2010. And we don’t like to brag, but we just launched a class taught by the Lent Madness Supreme Executive Committee: Praying with Saints with Scott Gunn and Tim Schenck For Individuals and For Groups.

Lent Madness is fun, but it also brings the saints less formally and more familiarly into Christian households during Lent. This effect is in keeping with Scott and Tim’s emphasis in this class, which focuses on bringing the saints into our lives as deeply honored fellow-Christians. They encourage us to view the saints as companions whose example we wish to emulate, rather than seeing the saints as so many of us do: as far away, unearthly beings, perfect, holy, and inaccessible.

Rather than seeing the saints as looking down on us from pious mountaintops, Scott and Tim encourage us to view saints as accessible figures: fellow-Christians through whom Christ’s light shines exceptionally brightly. We ourselves are saints, they remind us, through our baptisms. The saints whom we celebrate are our people: baptized Christians whom the Church sets apart to remember as our heroes; those of us whose lives shine most brightly. They are the great “cloud of witnesses” who encourage us as we live our lives in Christ.

In this class, Scott and Tim discuss how to learn about the saints, how to see them in relation to our own lives, and how to pray with them. For a preview of the class, please click below.