The Church We Dream About: Simple on Purpose - 8/3/26

Talk to me about that if you're interested. So we are starting a new series.

We've got a slide up here.

I don't know why that sun is so smiley. This is a ChatGPT thing.

Besides the smiley sun, I like the slide. But the title is really what we're

going for, The Church We Dream About. And that's really a pretty self-explanatory thing.

I ask my wife all the time. We've been working actually over the last,

well, since January, since we moved into this new building and have just kind

of been trying to figure out, you know, our direction and where the Lord's calling us.

And over the last year, half a year, the staff, elders, and their spouses have

all been doing some work together, doing some vision casting, figuring things out.

And we just had a meeting on Wednesday. It was really good, an all-day meeting.

Thanks to people for giving us their whole day to talk about church, those who were there.

And it was really good. And I went home and I asked my wife the question that

I asked her, is this the church we want to go to?

You know, because we have to come here because, you know, this is my job.

So we come here, but it's like it's hard because we want we've been in ministry a long time.

This is my first lead pastor role where I'm, you know, like it's a group effort

thing. But like it's kind of my job to make sure we're moving in the direction we're called to.

And like we really, my wife and I have really wanted to figure out like,

what is God calling us to and what are we dreaming about?

And this whole team has come together and dreamed about it. And I asked my wife,

is this the church you want to go to?

And she said, yeah, you know, it is. This is where we are trying to go and where

we're all trying to be led, where we think the Lord is calling us.

This is where we want to go. We've been asking ourselves, what is God calling

us to be as we are in this new place and moving in this new direction?

And that's really important questions to ask at the beginning of something because,

if you've been around church for a long time, and I've been,

a Christian since I can remember, been going to church since I can remember,

you know that there are all kinds of ways to do church.

Churches come in many shapes, sizes, flavors, varieties. They have different things they care about.

And what we're trying to do right now and what we've been trying to do is figure

out what is What is our flavor? What is our unique calling?

What is God going to do in this church? And especially as we've started to see

a lot of you people are new.

It's really wonderful. By the way, welcome. Thank you for being here.

If you're new here and you're like, what is this? Well, I'm going to tell you,

what I think this is today. So it's a perfect time for you to be here.

But as we're seeing a lot of new people come to church and I feel like people

are getting to know us and we're putting ourselves out there,

I really want to take some time to just lay out a vision, an idea of what we

think this church could be, what we'd like this church to be.

And so what we're going to do for the next, I think, three weeks,

but I'm going to say maybe four weeks because that's how I roll.

Because sometimes I just talk too long.

So the next three to four weeks is we're going to just dive into some aspects

and explain, you know, biblically, theologically, missiologically.

That's the theology of mission, what we're doing, what we're up to,

why we are trying to do what we think we're trying to do and why we think it matters.

Why we are trying to choose and define this flavor of church that we want to be.

So I've broken up. We've written as a team over the last couple months kind

of a vision statement. It's a little bit long, but I've broken it up into three sections.

And we're just going to go, I think, again, three sections, not four, but we'll see.

Going to be hopefully three sections. We're going to start with one today.

And this is like the beginning of this vision statement. It goes like this.

We are committed to being a healthy, simple church shaped by the grace and presence of Jesus.

We aim to be ordinary people living under the gracious supply of a kind God,

loving Jesus, loving others, and finding life to the full.

No applause? No. I wouldn't have expected that. I expected that.

You might think, and you wouldn't be wrong, that these are things that almost

any church would say they want to be.

And it's just true. I think every church could really come around this and agree to most of this.

But there's one thing here that I think is unique, and it's kind of the one

thing that I'm most drawn to in these first couple of statements,

and that is that we want to be a simple church.

A simple church. It just is something that my heart really longs for.

I want us to be a simple church. And so because we're going to be a simple church,

that means we're not going to be the best.

We're not going to try to be the best. We're not going to be the biggest.

We're not going to be, certainly not going to be the most epic.

Not going to be doing any of that. We're not going to be the coolest because

that wasn't going to happen anyway.

And we're not going to be even, we're not even going to be, we're not going

to be at least not be aiming to be the most effective.

We're not even going for that. the most excellent. We're not even going for

that because we want to be simple on purpose, simple on purpose.

That's what I'm calling this whole message. That's the thing,

simple on purpose, which means that as we grow, and I do think the Lord is going

to bring some growth here.

And as the years go by and as things change, we're going to fight to stay simple.

We're going to fight to stay simple.

We are going to fight to be people who are focusing on And

becoming people who love Jesus, who love others, who are just making much of

the grace of God, which is like the thing that we have, the thing that we need

to treasure, the thing that we need to cherish, we are going to fight for that.

See, even now as this church is pretty small and it's easy to be simple when

you're small, we want to set this in stone and aim for simplicity because we

know, I know, and I think you probably know,

that complexity has a way of winning out and creeping in over time.

If you're married, I've been married just, we did our 17 years recently, a couple weekends ago.

Yeah, okay. Thank you, Ryan. Yes. Just cheer for my wife, really.

She's the one who's done it all. Let's go.

17 years. And we, it's funny, like our story, like we met doing a two-year kind

of Peace Corps-like program where we made $30 a week.

That's where we met. And the value, the main value of this program was simplicity.

And like we really have internalized that throughout our lives.

We're like we want to aim for simple in our lives.

And I've got to tell you, just wanting it is not enough.

We've had to fight for it over and over. Every single year we assess our lives

and we say, how did it get so complicated?

How is it that we crept so much from this desire to just be simple and not care

about, you know, just like whatever, just like let life happen,

let the Lord lead forever?

Even when we value and share that value of simplicity, we've seen over and over

again that the minute we stop fighting for simplicity, complexity starts to creep in.

And I think that will happen in church unless we're careful. But we want to be simple.

And there's three big reasons why we want to be simple. And the first and the

most important one is that because the gospel is simple.

The gospel is straightforward. The gospel is not the good news that is that

Jesus went around proclaiming. It's not a performance improvement plan. It's not that.

It is not, you should get better, you should do more, you should become a better person.

The gospel begins with a statement of what Jesus has done. My favorite gospel

statement of scripture is from Titus 2. And a couple months ago,

we did a whole series through Titus. So this is probably familiar.

But I love the way that Titus 2.11 begins talking about what the gospel is.

And in Titus, it says this, The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation

for all people, instructing us to deny godlessness and worldly lusts and to live,

in a sensible, righteous, and godly way in the present age while we wait for the blessed hope,

the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.

He gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to cleanse for

himself a people of his own possession, eager to do good works.

I love this statement because it's so clear on how the gospel begins and the root of it.

It's simple. The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation.

That's the pronouncement. That's the good news. God's grace has appeared and

salvation is the result.

The gospel does not begin with me, which is such good news. It doesn't begin

with my goodness or my potential or how cool I am.

It doesn't begin at all with my qualities or my character.

It begins and it ever rests on what God himself has done and initiated in Jesus Christ.

The grace of God has appeared.

And as he's appeared, he's given himself. God has appeared.

He's flipped on the light switch. He's let us know what is true,

what is good, what is beautiful, what life is for.

He's come down to us to the point where we can see and touch and know and recognize him.

He's not up there hiding from us so that we just have to become better people,

more enlightened, whatever. He has come here. He's present. Grace is here. That is the good news.

And it is transformative to just realize that, that the greatest resource,

like, because of course, gospel is not a performance improvement plan.

It's not dependent on how good I become.

But it is an enabling and equipping that comes from his nearness and his presence, his closeness with us.

It's what he's done, what he's initiated, what he makes possible through his

grace, through his kindness.

Romans 5a is my favorite verse. God demonstrates his love for us.

While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. While we still had nothing

to offer, while we had very little

beauty or very little about us that was worthwhile, He just came down.

He made himself present. He offered himself as a sacrifice for sin so that he

would demonstrate his love, show us what it is that he loves us.

And grace is so amazing. I want to just think about grace for a minute here,

because grace is a great word. I think it is the fundamental word that defines

kind of the relationship between God and people.

It is God's grace towards us.

But grace is a great word. But for, I think, a lot of Christians.

We take grace and we make it too complicated and we make it too narrow.

We tend to theologize the word, and I love to theologize words,

and we make it, we think about grace in terms of the economy of forgiveness, right?

So we understand, like the gospel is the statement of fact that we're not worthy

of God, we've fallen short of his glory, like we are guilty of sin,

and that guilt is problematic on a fundamental level.

And we say, okay, but the solution to my problem, that I'm guilty,

is that God gives us grace, Jesus Christ has come. He pays the price.

He forgives us. And so we think about grace in terms of that economy of grace.

He pays our debt for us. And all that's true.

And all that's good. And all that is absolutely a part of the gospel.

We know that we've sinned. We know that the currency of forgiveness is what

Jesus has done on the cross. And we have to hold on to that.

That is where it all rests on. It's legitimate.

The problem is, though, that to think of grace only in that way, I think, is reductive.

As we look at the way Paul talks about grace, even the way that Jesus talks

about grace, it's a bigger word than merely like a sin management thing is more going on in grace.

It's not a word that is confined to a moral economy, a balancing of the books alone.

When the Bible talks about grace, grace is relevant to every part of your Christian

life, every part of your life that's going on every moment that you breathe

you are the recipient of grace.

Not just when you've done bad and I need to balance the scales.

No, every moment that I wake up on my best day when I'm just loving the Lord, I am bathed in grace.

My whole life is sustained by His kindness.

Every breath that I breathe, there's nothing morally right or wrong about me

inhaling and exhaling, but it is all a product of a gracious and kind God who sustains and loves me.

When the Bible talks about grace, it's relevant to every part of your life.

Think about the sun, okay?

The sun, if you woke up one day and there was just no sun, you wouldn't have merely a light problem.

Like, it wouldn't just be dark. You would have a systemic failure of the whole world.

There wouldn't be any heat, which would be your first probably bigger problem than light, right?

There wouldn't be any tides. Plants wouldn't grow.

Life couldn't exist. Were the sun not there?

The sun certainly solves your light problem, but it holds together the whole system of the world.

Grace solves your sin problem. It solves the problem that we're just like falling

short of God's glory, that we are guilty on a fundamental level.

It solves that problem, but it also is just the sustaining thing that makes my life work.

It holds the whole system together.

And the gospel is simple because it is the good news that God's grace has appeared,

and that it is just so obvious and so loud and so clear and it is on offer as

something that we can embrace

and be thankful for and build our lives around and rejoice in every day and

know that it is the secure gifts given to us by a good God.

And it is the truth that God is. And this is my favorite thing,

the thing that has shocked me the most as I've grown in a Christian And as a

Christian, the realization that God is kind, He's kind.

And he wants us to know his love and his kindness. He wants us to be people

who just know and accept and just see him for who he is.

He's good and he's kind. Everything that Jesus taught and taught his disciples

to do, it is all in this context of an understanding that God is kind and he's

ordered the world around his kindness and his provision and his grace to you.

And everything that you have in terms of moral progress and progress in the

Christian life is coming, I

think, to understand this more and more fundamentally, that God loves you.

He cares for you. He provides everything that you need, that you can entirely

depend on him for whatever you need day by day, literally for anything that

you might need. He is the single resource that we can rely on because he's gracious.

And this whole world is held together by the unexpected and undeserved kindness of a loving God.

Our world is bathed in his love. And if we would just like what we're called

to do is we're just called to look at him, see how good he is.

Hebrews tells us to fix our eyes upon him. Like that's the work of a Christian.

Just look to the kind, providing, gracious God.

God. He isn't asking us to be more or to be better. He isn't asking us to do

more or accomplish something for him.

He's the one who holds our lives together, and he's just asking us to just accept

that he's doing that, that he'll provide our every need.

The gospel is simple, a proclamation of the goodness and kindness of God who

appears, he forgives, and who, in light of that forgiveness,

teaches us to live not as the best, not as the most awesome,

but in just a sensible way.

Sensible people recognize, well, like I've been provided things,

I'm going to just go ahead and use those things.

A sensible way is to rely and by faith just walk in the righteousness that Jesus

makes possible, to walk in this godly way, this way of knowing about who God

is and ordering my life around him. The gospel is simple.

And because the gospel is simple, as a church, we can be simple.

As a church, we can take care to just keep the main thing the main thing.

And to not try to be impressive in any way.

I couldn't if I tried, so I'm not going to try. Let's not try to be impressive to anyone.

And instead, let's impress upon ourselves and those who come in that God is

for them, that He is gracious, and that He is kind, and He is forgiving.

And all that we're doing is just responding to His grace and responding to His kindness.

I'm just saying, we have been given a deep well, like let's just draw from it. That's the gospel.

It's so good and so freeing to realize that we need to accomplish nothing except

lifting up the accomplishments of Jesus.

That doesn't mean we don't do anything. We make much of the grace of God and

it's fun. It's not a burden.

It's not something that we need to do to prove ourselves, but it's part of a

life to the full, like John 10, 10 promise. I've come that they might have life

to the fullest. It's just making much of the grace and supply of God. It's so good.

Now, at this point though, I don't think I've said anything that any Christian wouldn't agree with.

I hope I haven't. I think it's pretty fundamental. I think most people just say amen.

But I think where things get complicated in churches is that we also,

and this is important, we have a mission.

We have a mission that we've been sent on. You've probably read the last couple verses of Matthew 28.

We call this the Great Commission. It's kind of our title for it.

Jesus doesn't call it the Great Commission, but we call it that.

And I think it's a fair thing to call it.

Jesus, his last words to his disciple at the end of Matthew is this.

He says, All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth.

Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name

of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you.

And remember, I'm always with you to the end of the age. There's that grace again.

Oh, there it is. That's where I wanted to be. I was looking at the wrong side of the page.

See, Christians, we can agree that we're grace people, like Jesus people.

Everybody agrees on that.

But I think where usually things get a little bit different,

like where the emphasis and the different flavors go is that we hear this term,

go, make disciples all nation. We hear this missional commandment.

And then there are a whole lot of different ideas about how we go about doing that?

What is the best way to accomplish that goal? And I would argue that, this is my opinion, and,

I'm wrong about many things, but I would argue that over the last 100 years

or so, as we've come into the technological and,

digital post-World War II age, the church has been increasingly captivated by

a missional vision and missional tactics that are actually, I think,

in unhealthy ways, bypassing God's design for mission.

I'm going to spend the rest of the time explaining what I mean by that.

So what I think we're doing is that in the name of missional effectiveness.

We are bypassing God's design for mission.

And my desire for this church to be simple, I think our desire for this church

to be simple on purpose is about just getting back to God's design for mission.

I actually think the simple church is the missional church. The simple church

is the one that is effectively reaching the world and making disciples of all

people because God's mission has always run through his people.

It's like just a fundamentally clear picture that we see throughout the Old

and the New Testament that God's mission, his redemption, his work in the world

always involves people, getting a group of people and working through them.

You see this just a few pages into the Bible. If you look at Genesis chapter

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

12, like just, I don't know, like six pages in probably.

In Genesis chapter 12, God calls a man, a man named Abraham.

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

He's just a pagan. He's not a God worshiper. There's nothing about him that

is qualitatively amazing, but God just chooses him and he tells them this,

go from the land of your relatives and your father's house to the land that

I will show you and I will make you into a great nation,

and all the peoples of the earth will be blessed through you.

I think I have a slide for that one.

All right, so you see, God just chooses Abraham. He says, I'm going to make you a nation.

And then through you, through this nation that I'm going to bring about,

blessing will come to the whole world.

And as the story goes along, you probably remember it from Sunday school.

Flannel board, we'll get those out.

The story goes along. There's many twists and turns, but God makes good on this promise.

He brings Abraham's descendants down to Egypt to protect them through a famine

and sustain them. And they grow there and they become many, many people.

And then after a while, I mean, Pharaoh doesn't like that they're so powerful

and so wealthy and he enslaves them.

And then what does God do in the book of Exodus? He sends Moses and he sends

Moses down to Egypt to free his people and bring them into the promised land.

And on the way, he reminds them of his plan and his promise and his intention for him.

Deuteronomy 6-7, I mean, among many other passages throughout Exodus and Deuteronomy, it says this.

You're a holy people belonging to the Lord, your God.

The Lord, your God has chosen you to be his own possession out of all the peoples

on the face of the earth. This is just the extension of the promise to Abraham.

We're going to bless the world through your descendants. And God takes these

people and he says, I'm going to like make you the vehicle for my mission and

you're going to be my people. I'm going to be your God.

Like you're going to be called and distinct and worship me.

So God is advancing his mission, calling a people, a people gracing them with

his kindness and his presence.

He's inviting them to be distinct, to be a people who worship God.

People of love and who bless God and who demonstrate through his care of them,

demonstrate his kindness for the whole world.

And as the mission progresses, Jesus appears and this great gospel pronouncement, the good news,

is that this chosenness, which was to Abraham's people for blessing all the

world and extends it to his descendants, that chosenness.

The sphere of it is extended.

Jesus makes it so that all who come to him by faith can be adopted into this

promise and into this blessing and be a part of his plan to bless the whole

world through his people.

We read about it in 1 Peter 2, 9-10.

Peter's very conscious of the Jewish context, but he understands that what God

is doing in Christ is he's opening up the invitation.

He's widening the circle so that God will form a people. He says this,

you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, people of his possession,

so that you may proclaim the praises of the one who called you out of darkness

and into his marvelous light.

Once you were not a people, but now you're God's people.

You had not received mercy, but now you've received mercy.

Through the grace, mercy, kindness of Jesus on display, God is widening the circle.

He's adopting people, making them his, making them distinct,

calling them to worship. And through those people, through his people that he's

calling into his family, he's going to bless the whole world.

And here's where the issue is. What I think is really clear in scripture is

that mission runs through God's people.

God's missional design is to form a people, a distinct people, a worshiping people, a.

And in these days, like this days, this post-Jesus days, that runs through his church.

And the church is a vehicle for his mission. And if the church,

I believe this is true, if the church is healthy and growing in worship and

growing in depth of love for the Lord,

in its simple call to be God's people, to love the Lord, to love others,

then when the church does that, when God's people,

are holding onto that vision, then the mission moves forward because people

are going to see, wow, something is going on. It's not that these people are so great.

It's that they recognize the kindness and love and grace of God,

and it's on display in their lives.

But many of the ways I think, and this is, again, I could be wrong,

and maybe I'm being a little judgy, and I'm sorry, but I think that many of

the ways that the church has pursued mission over the last hundred years have

been increasingly bypassing God's design.

Or to put it another way, many of the missional methods could happen with or

without the church, right?

Like a lot of the times we think about, oh, we're going to get the word out.

It doesn't matter if the church is behind it.

We've come to believe that to reach a people, all we need is to give a microphone

to a dynamic communicator.

I just don't see it.

We think all that matters is that the message gets out.

Never mind if people are growing in faith, if they're loving the Lord their

God, if they're loving people, never mind if people are spiritually healthy,

never mind if that dynamic communicator is a person of integrity who loves the Lord,

which doesn't matter because the message is going out.

We have dismembered the message from the church, from God's people.

And I think that is a huge problem.

And is the reason why I just want us to slow down and keep things simple. We have to.

Because, and this is the last point, because just driving it home,

the medium is the message.

That is not a biblical observation, but I think it's absolutely true.

Marshall McLuhan, a professor of communications in 1964, he coined that phrase.

And he's just making the point that there is an inevitable interaction,

like you can't separate an idea from its context. There's an interaction between

a message and the way the message is delivered. Those things shape one another.

In this world, truth is not abstract. It is embodied.

It's lived. That's why Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

You think, well, truth is just abstract ideas. No, it's Jesus,

the living, breathing person.

Come into the world showing us what it is to love God. He is the truth embodied.

Truth is always embodied. Truth is always embedded.

And what we're called to be is gospel people who are living the truth of what

Jesus has done and what it means.

We're supposed to be signposts of that.

You can't deliver a message in isolation from its medium, from the vehicle in

which the message is coming to you.

And God sends his message into the world and that message lives in the church.

God's people and the message of the gospel, the message that they live,

like are their lives and those two things are inseparable.

So like, if we want to be missionally effective, we have to be just about the

grace and the kindness of God, about living and organizing our lives around

that more than anything else.

Woe to me. Yeah.

I get in my brain that I just need to be a better communicator,

that somehow that's what God wants, and just neglect the health and the spiritual

vitality of this church.

I do not want to do that. I'm sure that I will do that in many ways that I need

to repent of. So just tell me.

We need to care about that. 2 Corinthians 2.14, I love this little way that

Paul describes the church and its mission.

It's a really good picture. He says, thanks be to God, talking about the Corinthian

church, who always leads us in Christ's triumphal procession and through us

spreads the aroma of the knowledge of him in every place.

See, Paul understood that the medium is the message. You can't separate the

message of the gospel, the knowledge, the information of who Jesus is from the people of God.

Paul understood that you can smell a Christian before you can hear them.

You should be stinky, right? It's good. See, it's fine.

And Paul had a vision of a church that was like burning incense.

That's how they worshiped back in the day. They would burn incense.

You know, you've been in the hippie store. They're still doing it.

You're burning incense before the altar of God. And you would walk into the

place where the temple was going on. And you could smell worship before you could hear worship.

Because the smell of worship, this palpable sense was thick in the air.

His vision that he's casting is that God's people aren't just people who are

delivering facts, information about who God is The church is being led in worship

and that worship itself The people being a worshipping people,

a distinct people, a people called by God,

Who are just living for him That itself is spreading knowledge of who he is,

what he's like and what he's doing in the world,

And the most powerful way for a message to go out is when the church is about

the business of worshiping and celebrating God's grace.

And when every person's life is lived like burning incense in worship of God.

God's message of salvation lives in God's saved people. I've used this quote

before by Leslie Newbigin, one of my favorite writers.

He says this, The only hermeneutic of the gospel, the only way to explain the

gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it. I love that clarity.

Because the message disembodied from the church, it actually doesn't make that

much sense. It might make some mechanical, conceptual sense.

Oh, Jesus pays the price of forgiveness.

So then we are forgiven, and then we're a part of God's people.

But honestly, outside of seeing what that does to people, so what? Thank you.

What I think is true is that when people really embrace the grace of God,

their lives get transformed because they're not trying to prove anything anymore. They're set free.

They're invited to turn away from selfishness and to

throw themselves on a merciful God who sustains and supplies for them and to

grow in confidence that they don't actually have to constantly be striving and

gathering and getting stuff for myself.

Like when the church is leaning into the gospel, living as if they believed

it, then that is the best thing that we can do as a church.

Oh, we've got time. Okay, I was worrying we wouldn't have time.

So that's the invitation. I want us to just make super clear.

We want to be a simple church, people who are growing into and practicing life under the grace of God.

And man, if we can do that, I'll die a happy man. I really will.

This is all that it is. And if, gosh, if we do that and we're growing as followers

of Jesus and we don't grow in numbers, great.

Whatever God has, it's wonderful.

His grace is enough for us. I would like that to be what we really believe and internalize.

Just to get a little practical, because this is one of it was hot off the presses

for our meeting on Wednesday but we were thinking about okay so okay I mean

this is all nice conceptual ideas right yes let's just be love grace love Jesus more that'd be great,

But we're sort of trying to flesh out and figure out, okay, what does this look like?

And we come up with this little model for the way we pursue this vision. There we go.

It's our missional strategy. And the hope is that we can, institutionally as

a church, guide people to discover their next steps in becoming an everyday disciple.

Like an everyday disciple is somebody who's making much of the grace of God,

who's doing this, make disciples of all nations, teaching them to obey everything

that I've commanded them to do.

That's not a heavy thing, but it's an invitation to step into grace.

So we just want to be a church that helps people wherever they're at along that

pathway of coming to explore who Jesus is, figure out what their next step is.

We kind of have three main things that we're going to do. We're going to be,

first of all, just invite people.

We are trying to be like an open community.

Like we think a church has a life.

It's mostly social, right? It's interactive, it's relational,

it's connectional. And so we're trying to create open invitations for anyone

to come into this place and to be a part of the life of our community.

One way we do that is like through MomCo, a great example. Like MomCo is a ministry

for mothers of preschoolers. It used to be called Mops Mothers of Preschoolers.

They changed it to MomCo because they didn't want a cleaning tool to be the

name. I think that's fair.

Mom's got enough of that. So they change it to MomCo. And like we do that starting

here in September, right? September, every other Wednesday.

And we just have a bunch of women come in. So usually like 15 to 20 women and

their children. We do child care and stuff like that.

Love to have some help. By the way, we'll start talking about that.

Just let that in the back of your brain.

That is a big thing to do. But it's like, we're not doing like Bible study and

stuff. We're creating a community.

We're trying to create a place where the life of the church is kind of being extended out.

We do a lot of social things. We're just going to go watch some jets fly around.

Nothing spiritual about that, right?

But it's invitational. We're trying to create community connection points to

get people to rub shoulders with.

That's why we're in this weird building on the second floor with no parking.

There's so much parking, right? Because we want to be close to people.

We want to connect with people. We want people to see us, and we want to see

them. We want to have those interfacing and those interconnecting points.

So we want to be invitational. We want people to connect in the life of the

community, whether they want to follow Jesus or not, whether they know if they

want to follow Jesus or not, whether they're just exploring or they think we're weird or whatever.

Come hang out with us. We are weird. It's great.

That's how I roll. I'll be the weird one. And you can be the normal ones. It's okay.

So we want to be invitational. And then we want to connect people.

You know, we do groups. Groups are going to be starting up here again in September.

Small groups, men's groups, women's groups. Like, we're going to start to roll

at one-on-one discipleship. We haven't done a great job of that historically.

I'm going to talk more about this coming up.

But it's like, you know, because you go from this social invitational context

to a relational discipleship thing, where you start to talk to people about.

What's going on in their lives, what's going on in their hearts.

Like, how do I figure out what God has done, what he's doing? How do I grow in my faith?

So we're creating connection points where we can get into scripture,

where we can pray for one another, where we can, you know, do this thing of

discipleship that the church is called to.

And then finally, we do, talking about this again, as the school year gets started,

we've talked about it in the past, we hold onto some become discipleship habits that,

Bless, eat, confess, open your mouth and talk about Jesus, meet with God every

day and examine your life. And

we'll talk about those. Those don't mean anything to you. Totally fine.

They're just basic habits that we think we should practice in order to be making

the most of the grace of God.

And we try to do those together. And we talk about those and we will talk about

them more as we've done this move. Things have been crazy. We haven't talked

about them that much, but we're going to be talking about those again.

Again, because these are just things that we're doing to grow in our faith.

And I'm just going to be honest, like as we come along here,

we're going to be a lot of ideas, a lot of things that we could do,

and we're going to run them through this.

And if they don't fit somewhere in here, we're probably not going to do them.

That's how you stay simple, right? That's why we're doing this work now.

There's lots of things we can do, but there's a lot of things we're not going

to do in order to stay simple, In order to say, to go from just like,

to go deep with the Lord and for us to grow.

Because again, and I'm going to wrap it up here. A worship team can come up

and we're going to do communion together.

The calling we have is to become God's people, to be God's people, to grow in worship.

And there's so much to be done in my heart. I got to tell you,

when I was young, grew up in good churches, healthy churches.

But I was given a vision of kind of, and this is probably my own immaturity,

right? I probably absorbed the wrong thing and my own shallowness.

But I had like a really shallow idea of the depths of what it meant to follow God.

I thought following God was, I have a 15-minute quiet time in the morning.

And I tell myself I'm going to pray, but I don't actually do it because it's hard.

And I feel bad about it. I feel bad about a lot of things. That was my Christian

life. All the things I felt bad about how I didn't measure up.

And there wasn't, and again, this is probably my own issue.

There was not a lot of pathways to growing past the things that I feel bad about

and into this kind of life and life to the full that Jesus offers.

And what we want to do is just major on, particularly in that connection point

and that discipleship point of how do we get over the stuff?

How do I get over my own selfishness? How do I get over my own anxiety about

money, status, all the things that I can turn into idols?

How do I really, as I'm aging and growing, how do I become a person of love,

who is able to hold on loosely to the things in my life?

How do I become somebody who can go through illness, pain, suffering.

And yet still hold on to hope in the Lord? Because a lot of people just drop

out when that stuff comes.

How do I go through the whole of my life in its different stages and its different

places and deal with the interior stuff that's going on, my own pride in particular?

How do I go past those things at each stage?

These are the questions that I think we need to really focus on in our connection

times, just like how do we become people who are worshiping God,

who are finding that His grace is just like everywhere and that we're seeing him more.

Again, I think what we do is that we say, oh, well, we do some discipleship,

check, move on, let's do other programmatic things instead of really pressing

through to the deeper stuff that the Lord wants to do.

And so as a church, to keep it simple, we want to keep it simple so that we

can keep doing those things.

Beautiful. Well, we're going to talk more about this over the next two to three weeks. Um...

But for now, what we're going to do is we're going to take communion.

And I'm really excited about that. So what we're going to do,

you can come up this aisle, grab something.

You can go back to your seat that way, unless you're over here.