Western culture values two things: image, and ease. Put them together and we have created people stuck in what Mark Sayers calls the P.A.C.T- the Passive Aggressive Consumer Trap. What sorts of structures and leadership is necessary in a world like this? Listen to our sermon at the link below.
A Sacrificial Community
In this article in the Atlantic, Derek Thompson argues that “workism” has replaced Christianity as the de facto religion of American life- to devastating effect, because workism sacrifices others for advancement to a job or career that will fill life with meaning and purpose. The DNA of the early Christian community is exactly the opposite- wherever you found people confessing Jesus as Lord, you found them sacrificing their relationships, time, and even money for one another. Listen to our sermon, “The Sacrificial Community” at the link below, from Acts 2:36-47.
The Uncommon Community: A Confessional Community
Any good confession does three things: it accounts for all the facts, it establishes motive, and provides inside information that only somebody who was personally involved could have known. This is exactly the sort of confession the Christian community has always produced: That God has revealed to his people that he is keeping his promise to save the whole world under the Lordship of Jesus. Listen to our sermon on living as a confessional community at the link below.
The Enemy of Reconciliation
What is the primary enemy of the church in her mission to be a community of reconciliation? As Arthur Brooks points out in the New York Times, its an enemy common to us all: Contempt, or the “unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.” What would it look like for the church to begin taking her view of the “other” from Scripture- that all mankind, though fallen, is also made in the image of God- instead of from the politics of the moment?
The Uncommon Community: The Embassy of God
In 1984, Apple changed the world. They did it with a commercial that talked, not about what their products did, but why their products did it. The “why” was so powerful, so compelling, that we all live in the world in which that commercial created.
If the “why” is so powerful, the question needs to be asked- Why did God bring his people into his family? The way you answer this question shapes the trajectory and lived experience of the Christian faith. Check out our sermon on 2 Corinthians 5:14-21, “The Uncommon Community: the Embassy of God” at the link below.
The Wildness of the Family of God
Saying that the church is a family doesn’t risk making the church sound tedious. If anything, it risks the opposite. We always flee our families, not because we have figured them out, but because they are the only people that we cannot figure out. That we cannot control…
“The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a surprise. Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.”