Greetings,

For the last several days Yvonne has been healing up from a surgery and people from our church family have been providing great meals for our family. It has been an incredible demonstration of love and hospitality. We thank each one of you so much for your love and support. Acts of love like this are a great way to feel a part of the community. 

Community is where discipleship is incubated. All throughout scripture, wherever there is discipleship, there is deep community, and wherever there is community there is discipleship. The question in this culture is, what does community look like? How do we manufacture community? In a culture where divorce is normal, family time is foreign, virtual reality is more appealing than real reality and busyness seems to be the scapegoat for every reason to not connect, is there any wonder why our culture is starving for community and why there is a struggle to understand true community? 

Community requires time, effort and energy. Therefore, if community is important to us then we must make room for it in the rhythms of our lives. Since we are called to disciple and we are called to community I think we ought to work hard at making the room.  When we live in community with fellow Christ followers, discipleship is a natural byproduct.  

Every other month or so we get together with the elders and their wives to talk about the church, pray and eat. We always eat and we always eat really well. Last week we had an amazing dinner together and we always say the same thing, “why don’t we do this all the time?”

I know how hard it is to get schedules to line up, but the more opportunity we have to spend together with church folks, the better we will know them. And the better we know them, the more likely we will be to trust them. And the more we trust people, the more burdens we will share and the more people will feel like family. And when that type of one anothering happens, people see it and they crave it. People crave community and we have the opportunity to provide a gospel centered community for people. That’s really exciting.

There are 94 verses that talk about one anothering in the New Testament. We will be going through a lot of them after Easter as we begin our Community sermon series. Stay tuned! Maybe invite some people to join us in the series.

Love ya,