Home Team with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the Medicurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at Medicurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

So good to see you guys here.

I want to welcome you to a special weekend we are calling Home Team.

You guys know this.

MetaCurch is a place for all people.

We mean that.

Radical acceptance.

We are even letting Lakers fans in the building today can wear their jerseys and everything.

We're so excited that you joined us.

This is a message that if you've been here at MetaCurch since the beginning, you've heard a version of this a few times.

Here's something I believe about life and about leadership.

If you want something to actually be adopted, if you want it lived out in your life and the lives of the people that you have influence over, then you have to have clarity.

And if you actually want to have clarity, you have to not just communicate that vision and that mission, you have to over-communicate it.

So on our Metachurch staff, we have some values and we try to live by them and they make us successful in what we do.

And so we talk about them all of the time.

The things that you really want to instill in your family.

You can't just say it once, you have to say it all of the time.

If you want a loving marriage, then you don't just say, I love you on your wedding day and never say it again.

You say it all the time in all different ways.

You over-communicate it.

And the same is true with our mission here as the church.

And we come in on a lot of weekends and we we get into the details of like, you know, who is God and the big questions that we asked in the last series, or we talk about relationships and we dive in and get into the nitty-gritty of all of that.

But from time to time, we have to zoom out and remind ourselves: who are we?

What are we doing here?

And why is it so critical that the church actually exists?

I hope to do that today in my message called Home Team.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we love you and we thank you for being here with us.

We thank you that if we seek you, we will find you.

You've promised that, and we're here today seeking you, your design and desire for your church, which we are a part of.

And so I ask that we would just come and be humble enough to lay down any preconceived notions or ideas that we're bringing into the room and just to see what you have to say to us today.

We love you.

And we pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

When we started MetaCurch, before we started MetaCurch, we really started with a question.

And, you know, if you haven't been with us for very long, this might surprise you as the starting place for a local church.

But the question we started with was why would anyone go to church?

And maybe that's an odd question or an odd starting point, but it really isn't if you're actually paying attention to what's happening in the church world.

Why would anyone go to church?

The truth is the church has been in an active decline for decades.

Less and less people are going to church, more and more churches are closing their doors.

The church at one point in our country especially had significant cultural influence, significant societal power and horsepower.

It was looked at as one of the institutions that set the blueprint for how to live a successful life.

And even people who weren't convinced by the claims of Christianity usually saw the church as a force for good in the world.

That is the opposite of the state of the church today.

The church is not only in decline numerically, less and less people coming, but it has lost almost all of its influence and all of its cultural power.

It is seen no longer as a source of good, but as a source of hypocrisy and judgment.

It is seen as an archaic leftover from the Middle Ages when people were uneducated and didn't know better than to waste their Sunday gathering together.

Why would anyone go to church?

And the truth is there's even a lot of people who do believe in Jesus who have decided that organized local church is just not for them.

Is it really worth it to have to wake up early and give one of the days of your weekend away to getting your kids dressed and fighting with your spouse to get in the car and you're gonna be late and you're not gonna be able to find a seat?

And it's just a panicked experience to try and get your family to church often, especially if you have little kids.

And so many people see it and they think it's full of hypocrisy anyway, and they're like, you know what, I don't really need it.

I've got me and Jesus, and I'm good.

And so they give up on the church altogether.

Why would anyone go to church?

And if you are a local church and you're not thinking about that question, and you're not really seeking to answer that question, odds are that you will fall into the category of churches that are in active decline because you're not getting to the root of why church should actually be the most compelling part of somebody's life.

The first time that the word church shows up in scripture, it's actually from the words of Jesus himself.

In Matthew 16, 18, Jesus said, I will build my church.

I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not overpower it.

The gates of hell will not overpower it.

This is the first time that it's mentioned.

And it's mentioned by Jesus, and something we know about Jesus is he does not lie.

If he says something, you can take it to the bank.

And so Jesus says, I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not overpower it.

This is a powerful moment in the life of Jesus, and it's a powerful moment in scripture because it's the first time that we hear about this movement that we're still a part of.

Two thousand years later, this is a promise from Jesus that his church will remain, that it will grow, that it will have impact, that it will circle the world, that even all of the forces of evil and hell itself will not be able to stand against it.

So, if that's the church that Jesus promised, and the church that we see in the modern world is in active decline, then it's not Jesus who's wrong.

It's something about our understanding of what church actually is.

Matthew 16, 18 was really the foundational verse for Metachurch because we started with a question, which is why would anyone go to church?

And that led me to months and months and months of studying the word church to try and seek to understand what it actually is.

And so I studied the word church, it's the Greek word ekklesia.

When Jesus said this in the Greek, he said, I will build my ecclesia, and the gates of hell will not overpower it.

And ekklesia is a Greek compound word.

Kleo means out of, and ek means out or from.

And so ekklesia simply means the called out.

And so I studied that word as as deep as I've ever studied anything in my life.

I like went underwater for six months and dug into every single usage and everything I could read on, every single usage in all of the scriptures, and what I found was that we have lost a lot of Jesus' original intent.

That the way that we use the word church, the way that we organize ourselves as the church, is far and a way removed from what Jesus actually meant when he first said, I will build my ecclesia.

Ecclesia is a really interesting word because it's not a spiritual word, it's not a religious word, and Jesus had plenty of those to choose from.

And the other thing you need to know about Jesus is that Jesus is perfect, and every word he says is therefore perfect.

He doesn't misspeak.

He didn't mean to say synagogue and accidentally said ecclesia.

He didn't mean to say, I will build my temple.

He he meant to say, I will build my ecclesia.

And ecclesia is not a spiritual word, it was not a religious word.

Some of you know this, it was actually a political term.

The ecclesia happened when inside of a community or a society, certain members were called out, they would meet together, gather together, in order to enact a significant and specific purpose.

It was a political gathering out of the police, the city.

They would come together and say, We need to get this fixed or get this right or we can make this improvement.

And people were called out, they would gather together, meet together to then go move together and execute on the vision.

And so Jesus said, I will build my ecclesia.

It's a strange word, but Jesus was saying, I will be the one calling people out of society for a specific and significant purpose.

And by the way, this won't be like the political ecclesias that so often fail or falter.

This will be something that will change the world forever.

We have largely lost this.

And we've walked through this a lot of times, but there was an error in translation.

Ecclesia, the called out people of God, was translated to German Kirche, which meant the house of the Lord.

That was one of the first modern languages that the Bible was interpreted to, and eventually the German Bible was translated into English, and Kirche became church, not the called out people of God, instead the house of the Lord.

And so the modern church has bought three lies, three lies of the modern church.

The first is that it's a place.

And you know that this one is maybe the most true because you don't say, I am the church going to gather.

You say, I'm going to church.

We call our buildings the church, not the church building, the church itself.

This was such an advantage when we were meeting in the 151 saloon.

I know a lot of you have started coming since we opened up this place and God, like, you know, gift wrapped us this building for us to buy and all that.

So some of you never experienced the sticky floors and the toxic bathrooms of the 151 saloon.

But it was this natural built-in reminder screaming at us, this is not the church.

Saturday night at 1 a.m.

There was debauchery going on.

Sunday morning at 9 a.m.

There was worship going on.

It was obvious that it was the people, and we still have a little bit of an advantage because the top of our bingo doesn't say meta church, it says B-I-N-G-O.

We still have a little bit of a built-in reminder.

Someday that will change.

Someday it will say Meta up top.

Someday we'll customize this room.

Someday we'll have a built-in stage.

Someday our lobby won't be all makeshift.

And here's my actual fear.

My fear is that the more that the actual space begins to resemble all of the other churches that you can go into, the more we will be tempted to call the building the church.

And so we have to talk about this.

It's why I do a sermon like this.

At least once a year, we have to be reminded.

This is a lie of the modern church that it's a place.

Another lie is that it's an organization.

Oh, it's just a 501c3 nonprofit.

Some people think of the church, and what they think of is like the pastors, you know, the pastors and the staff and the faculty and the admin, and that's the church, you know.

And we go to the church and we listen to the church people.

And I'll be honest, we have a little bit of an advantage there too, because I don't exactly look like most preachers that you're gonna get in front of.

Like, I've got some tattoo advantage here to remind you, like this isn't some high and mighty, like I'm up, I'm up tall just so you can see me.

You know what I'm saying?

There's no like pedestal action going on.

But it's tough, man.

We we buy the lie that it's an organization, it's something that we go to, it's something that exists outside of you.

The third lie is that it's a meeting.

Well, I went to church.

What do you mean?

Well, number one, you mean the building, and number two, you mean the Sunday service.

That's what we call this.

It's how we talk about it, internally and externally.

This is Sunday service.

This isn't a church, this is the gathering of the church for worship.

It's a massive difference.

And when we misunderstand the ecclesia, we misunderstand the church.

We buy the lies of the modern church that the church is just a place.

It's a place to be protected, not a people to be pushed forward into their purpose.

So we see this, and the effects have been rampant.

We have taken the onus off of every single one of us as children of God.

I am who you say I am, I am a child of God.

And we think I'm an attender and they're the preacher.

They do the ministry and I attend and slide some money in every once in a while.

We have missed it, and because we've missed it, we have left the work of God up to a building and a small, small segment of spiritual professionals.

And then we wonder why the church has lost its power and its influence, why we don't see what we saw in the first three centuries of the church.

Where even though they couldn't gather like this, even though they were gathering underground, even though they were being excommunicated from their societies, fired from their jobs, removed from their families, even though they were dying by the Roman sword just to confess the name of Christ, it could not be stopped.

It spread around the known world and eventually circled the globe, that it changed society everywhere it went.

We saw the power of the church, the ecclesia, the movement of God's people in a way that people had never seen or experienced before.

It's because the church wasn't a place, it wasn't an organization, it wasn't a meeting that you can attend and check a box on your religious calendar to feel good, like you've made a difference because you sat in a seat.

Every single person understood I am the church, I am the movement.

If I don't move, the movement doesn't move.

If it's just up, we have three pastors on staff.

Right now, there's like six or seven hundred of you coming.

There's three pastors right now.

If it's up to us, we are screwed.

There's no way.

I'll do all that I can do.

I'm gonna give my life to it.

But you have to understand, just because I play this role on Sunday doesn't mean I don't have the exact same role as a member of MetaCurch that you do.

When we walk out of these doors, I get it.

You come on Sunday, I get a mic, you don't get a mic.

Some of y'all cray.

I don't know what you're gonna say up here, okay?

I get the mic, I look this way, you look that way, I get it.

I understand what that can do.

But the truth is, we are meta church.

And when we walk out these doors to a world without Christ, to a world that doesn't come here, they don't care who holds the mic.

They care who sees them in the middle of their distress, they care who shows up for them in the tough seasons of their life.

They care if you live and love and hold yourself and organize your life and love your spouse and raise your kids differently than the rest of the world and show them that there is actually something different inside of you.

These are the lies of the modern church, and it is not working.

So, what is the church?

I want to talk about the church on a few different layers because it's not just a place and it's not just an organization and it's not just your Sunday service.

I want you to pay attention to how the Apostle Paul described the local church.

In 1 Corinthians 12, he said this for just as the body is one and has many parts, and all the parts of that body, though many are one body, so also is Christ.

So, if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it.

If one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it.

Now, you are the body of Christ and individual members of it.

The ecclesia, the called out people of God.

To understand the church, you first must understand it on the individual level.

Not the level of the service where you can come and kind of disappear and be anonymous and and and not really have to interact.

You have to understand it on the individual level.

The body of Christ made up of all of the different parts.

And man, there is a lot of application out of this one verse because some of it is like, well, you know what?

I I don't really like the part that I play.

And who really wants to be the pinky toe?

You know what I'm saying?

Let me at least be a shin.

Let me be the calf muscle that helps control the walking of the body.

We we all want to play a role sometimes that we don't, you know.

Not everybody is up here singing because I've heard some of y'all sing, you know, and I'm saying, like, you gotta find your role, play your role, but it says if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it.

We put church like on our priority list and then we shift it around, you know, depending on what we have going on.

And you guys know this.

Well, I mean, we're not that place that's keeping tabs, keeping attendance.

You miss a week, we give you that nice church guilty call, you know.

Oh my blah, hope you're blessed, brothers.

All that you weren't here.

Like, that's not us, you know.

But where does it fall in priority?

When one member suffers, the body suffers.

When you are convinced that you don't actually have a purpose or a role in here, the whole body suffers.

You're a part of the body of Christ, which means it matters.

It matters that you show up.

Not fake, not with your nice Christian mask on, that you really show up in your full authenticity, that you really engage, you really worship whatever that means to you.

I don't need you to have both hands in the air because that's what you see other people doing.

That may not be what worship looks like to you, but you need to engage.

It matters that you find your spot, that you find your role, that you live it out.

Every person matters, and you know, the bigger a congregation uh congregation gets, the more it can be like, well, I'm just what does it really matter?

Everyone else will carry the weight.

You know who else thinks that?

Everybody.

There's like a 1090 rule where in almost any given large group, 10% of the people do 90% of the work.

In church, historically, 10% of the people give 90% of the money.

In church, historically, 10% of the congregation does 90% of the volunteering.

In the early church, 100% of the people saw 100% of the responsibility, and it changed the world.

It starts at the level of the individual, and this is how we build our strategy here at MetaCurch.

We build it with the individual in mind because you are the church, you are the movement, you are the called out people of God.

However, we are more than just individuals.

Let's look at that same passage.

For just as the body is one and has many parts, and all the parts of that body, though many, are one body, so also is Christ.

And if the foot should say, because I'm not a hand, I don't belong to the body, it is not for that reason any less a part of the body.

And if the ear should say, because I'm not an eye, I don't belong to the body, it is not for that reason any less a part of the body.

And if the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?

And if the whole body were an ear, then where would the sense of smell be?

But as it is, here it is.

God has arranged each one of the parts in the body just as he wanted.

We are individuals, but we are individuals who find our sense of purpose and belonging and even our identity as a part of the greater whole, the movement of Jesus.

This is how the movement started.

The apostles, who previous to that, most of them were the disciples of Jesus, went around the known world and they would start local ecclesias, local bodies of Christ.

This is what we are, metachurch.

We are not the fullness of the church, we are this small fraction of the global church, a billion plus people who claim the name of Jesus, and we are this local expression of that.

This is the way that the church was organized, and this is the way that we find ourselves, and this is where many people begin to have problems.

A lot of people have problems with organized religion.

Organized church.

And there's a lot of ways at this, and you know, some people say, I don't like the whole thing, man.

I don't like, I don't like the smoke machine, you know, Jesus didn't have a smoke machine.

It's like, well, also smoke machines didn't exist.

You don't know he wouldn't have had a smoke machine, you know, but it's kind of besides the point.

We like to focus on method, you know?

And so, whatever expression of church that you're gonna do because you don't like what what all the other churches are doing, it will be organized.

I have no problem with house church.

I think there are house churches all over the world changing the world, and I don't like to argue about method.

All I'm saying is to say that's not organized is foolish.

You're gonna set a time, you're gonna send out an address, you're gonna have something to say, you're gonna put some chips and dips out.

You're going to organize things because we're organizing people.

We are meant to be with others, we're meant to be apart.

Hebrews 10 says this, and let us consider one another in order to provoke love and good works, not neglecting to gather together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day approaching.

Do not neglect gathering together.

Now let me say this the church, especially the church in the West, has done its job to give people all kinds of ammunition to call into question organized church.

The hypocrisy and the judgmentalism and the scandals and the pastors with the biggest platforms having affairs and all kinds of embezzling and mismanagement and and like power and we've seen all of it.

I really uh, you know, I thought a lot about whether or not I was gonna say the next thing that I'm gonna say.

I was still thinking about it when I got up here.

Um I didn't pay a lot of attention.

To Johnny Depp and Amber Heard because I'm an adult and I have better things to do, but I did see that like they both kind of won, but he like really won, you know.

And then I'm on Twitter, you know, because I'm an idiot, I should get off, but I'm on Twitter.

And what what I noticed, and and this was my first thought, what I noticed was Amber Heard was really one of the like keystone uh members of the Me Too movement, right?

And and so what I saw online after it came out that she was uh crazy, I don't know, like really, like, really like doing a lot and fabricating and making up, and what what happened was there were two sides, and both of them were saying the same thing, they just had different agendas.

One side was saying this is gonna destroy our movement.

Everyone is gonna see her as a reflection of what we are, and now no one's gonna take it seriously.

And then there's kind of another side who thought the Me Too movement was like an overcorrection or a reach of sorts, and so they were celebrating the fact that this was going to destroy the Me Too movement, and both sides thought the same thing that because there was one person who had a key platform inside of that movement, that the whole movement itself would unravel.

And I'm I don't have a political opinion on that.

My first thought was that's what happens in church.

One of the big, big famous guys with the big platforms and the big YouTube following and everything else, and then it comes out, and you know, he was having affairs or you know, toxic work environments, or whatever else, hypocrisy, and the world treats it the exact same way.

That guy was a representative of that guy, and so now I'm ruling out both of them.

And when it happens in a secular movement, people mourn it.

And not all, but when it happens in the Christian movement, many people celebrate it.

And they put it in their pocket as ammunition to count out the church and God and all that that entails.

It's kind of human nature, but when you pull it back, it really is quite foolish.

And I know that many of us have had really, really negative church experiences and really, really negative run-ins with people in spiritual authority over us and over others.

And I I mean, I had my own journey of wondering if I was done with the local church in its entirety because of some of the things I experienced working inside of it.

But we don't really do this in our everyday life, you know.

It's like the team that you rep, when one of the GMs, one of the managers, someone in management goes sideways, has a scandal, does something bad, you don't stop rooting for that team.

And more than that, you don't stop believing in the sport altogether.

We see this in music.

We all know what our Kelly's been up to for a while.

I can't listen to Brian McKnight now.

I've got to give up on RB altogether.

We don't do this in other areas, but we're quick to do it with the church.

Part of understanding that the church is made up of individuals is realizing that as individuals, we are all jacked up.

We all have our own worst ways, we all have the areas where we fall short, and we should all be on a journey to work on that and grow and mature and become more and more of who God created us to be.

But Jesus left the church and he left it in the hands of fallible, broken, jacked up people.

And we don't excuse people's behavior, but we don't project that behavior onto God.

Hebrews says, this is 2,000 years ago.

Don't neglect meeting together, as some are already in the habit of doing.

This was a problem right from the jump.

And you know, it's been really exacerbated by the pandemic.

I mean, really, really.

Most churches are seeing like 30% attendance of where they were pre-pandemic.

We're not quite there, but pre-pandemic, we were 1200, 1,300 people, now we're six or seven hundred.

And it's not because half of our people are still in quarantine.

They're at their kids' volleyball games, they're at the new Marvel movie.

What's happened is when we lose sight of what the church is, it becomes a place, an organization, a meeting.

It falls lower and lower on our priority as we see less and less purpose in it, and it becomes easier and easier to miss.

We've lost what the church actually is.

The movement of Jesus called out on the earth.

We see these large gatherings, these local communities, and in the book of Acts, Acts 11, it says this, and the hand of the Lord was with them, and a large number who believed turned to the Lord.

And the news about them reached the ears of the Ecclesia at Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas off to Antioch.

The church in Jerusalem, by today's standard, would have been a mega church.

In Acts chapter 2, 3,000 people believe in Jesus and get baptized, and that would just be counting the men.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

Thousands of believers in Jerusalem.

And we went through this in detail in our last series, but 40 days after Jesus hung on a Roman cross in Jerusalem, after he was buried in Jerusalem, thousands of people came to believe in him in Jerusalem.

Something had happened, something that was getting ready to shake the foundations of the world.

The church functions when individuals find their purpose inside of it and live it out as a part of the broader movement alongside other Jesus followers.

We are not meant to be Lone Rangers doing it all by ourselves outside the context of the broader movement, and we are not called to just be a number inside the masses who can hide and be anonymous in their faith.

We are called to be called-out people living out the mission of Jesus together.

Together.

This has been how the church has organized itself for quite some time now, and this has largely been understood by most churches, and yet we continue to fall more and more into obscurity, lose more and more of our cultural power and significance, and that's because this two-layer level of church is not the full picture.

We see something significant in Acts chapter 2.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

This is the first church.

Here's how they are described.

Every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple, that's the big meeting, and they broke bread from house to house.

They ate their food with joyful and sincere hearts.

Not just meeting together in the temple, but also moving together from house to house.

They didn't just have a home church, they had a home team.

This is the missing layer, the missing part is that we're not just meant to be individuals, and we're not just meant to be the large gathering, but we were made for community with other individuals.

We were made to find a home team.

And here's why.

Because application happens in community.

Application happens in community.

What's happened in the Western church is we have become an informational movement.

You come to Sunday morning, you get information, you get a message, you get bullet points, you get a big idea or three steps to do whatever.

You get information.

And then you go to a Bible study and you get information.

And then you go to a class and you get information.

And then you go to a small group where you put in a DVD of a pastor who's better than your pastor, that's in a bigger church than your church, and you get more information.

And the church is a place, and the church is an organization, and the church is a meeting, and the church becomes informational.

And at some level, we begin to measure our holiness and our righteousness by our spiritual IQ.

And I wonder how many verses you can quote, and I wonder if you know how to sing the harmony, the cornerstone, and I wonder if you know how to how to exactly say the whole calendar of church activities, Monday through Sunday.

However high your intelligence level is, do you know who wrote all the books of the Old Testament?

And can you quote them in chronological order?

I grew up in these churches.

Your spirituality was defined by how much you knew.

This is what James, the brother of Jesus, said.

He said, But be doers of the word and not hearers only.

Deceiving yourself.

Living as a divided man, a divided woman.

He doesn't say there's anything wrong with hearing.

As a matter of fact, all throughout the scriptures, you will see that we are almost begged to take seriously the scriptures, the words of Jesus, the message that he has.

But information only matters if it actually becomes application in your life.

After months and months and months of searching through what the church is, the ecclesia, its original intention, here's the simplest way that we were able to put what the church was meant to do.

It was meant to meet together and move together.

Do not neglect meeting together, but do not be hearers only deceiving yourself.

Be doers of the word.

Actually move.

And what does it mean?

Actually move.

The church should move.

Does it mean this?

Is this the movement?

Actually getting here.

I know it's hard to get here.

I know your kids were terrible this morning.

But is this movement?

Or is this meeting?

Is this application?

Or is this information?

We're missing a circle, and you guys know this, but we're always uh we're always transparent here.

We put together a plan for this circle.

It can be difficult.

We're busy people, and that's everybody's excuse, and we're in 2022 now, and everyone's running in ten different directions, and every one of your kids is gonna make whatever professional sports league you think they're gonna make, so they play sports seven nights a week, and we're all very, very busy, you know.

And so it can be tough to get people to organize themselves and actually see the value in getting into community with other Jesus followers, and yet application happens in community.

Application requires some things.

We know this.

We know this in our lived experience.

We know this from studying human behavior.

Application requires accountability.

You want to really see the information of God, the word of God, become the power of God lived out through your life.

It requires accountability.

It requires people around you who actually care about you, who love you, who aren't there to judge you, but are there, like Hebrew says, to provoke you to love and good works.

It requires authenticity, real community where you can come in and actually be yourself.

Not play the religious game, not play the Christian game, come in and actually lay it all on the table.

Everything that we keep in the dark stays in the dark.

It runs and ruins our lives.

What we bring to the light of God can be restored and redeemed, and that requires authenticity, and that requires community.

We need the application, we need alliance, we need real, strong relationships that we can actually depend on.

There are three lies of the modern church.

It's a place, it's an organization, and it's a meeting.

And that is not the ecclesia, that's not what Jesus started.

The original intent reverses these lies.

It's not a place, it is a people, the people of God on an individual level.

It's not an organization, it is an organism.

It is the body of Christ.

It is actually moving and making waves and affecting change in the real world.

It is not a meeting, it is a movement, a movement of people that the gates of hell cannot stand against.

And let me point this out.

Gates are not an offensive weapon.

We think the church is a place, an organization, a meeting, something to be protected.

We read the words of Jesus and we imagine hell coming against us.

Gates are not an offensive weapon.

Gates are the last line of defense.

Jesus was not calling us to bunker down in our places, in our organizations, inside of our meetings, and hide and hope that hell will not overcome us.

The people of God, the movement of God, the ecclesia that Jesus started was put on earth to go after the power of hell on the earth.

That's why we're here.

This is an offensive strategy.

No more bunkering down.

The building that we have mistaken as the church, these are not the gates.

You are the weapon, you are the message of God, the gospel incarnated to the world.

Ambassadors of God crying out for people to be connected with Jesus and therefore connected with their Father in heaven.

Wayward kids, just like you and I were at one point, whose father is desperate for them to come home.

Application happens in community.

You guys know this, we put a high value on transparency here.

When we launched MetaCurch, we immediately put together our plan for life teams.

And that is what most people would traditionally call small groups.

And you know, we call them teams because we think team informs you that once you've met together, your work isn't over.

It's actually just beginning.

Teams have something to do, right?

Our life teams are not strictly informational.

It's not a Bible study, you're not gonna pop in a DVD and get more information there.

Application-based.

Life teams function as the second step in a second space to what we do on Sunday.

They're based off of Sunday's sermon.

And they all gear towards that week's application question, where you, as a member of a life team, state specifically what you are going to do with what you have learned.

This is one of the thoughts we had.

The millions and millions of people sitting in churches on Sunday mornings.

If everyone did one thing about what they heard, if everyone applied one truth to their life every week, how quickly would we actually change the world?

We do what's called a rap sheet.

We review, we apply, and we pray.

And it really started with a bang.

Here in just a little bit, I'm gonna really encourage anyone who might be even slightly interested in hosting a life team to come meet me right after the service.

The first time we did this, it was in 2019.

And we had over 30 people stand up to be life team leaders.

Our life teams were rocking and rolling.

We had hundreds of people who were attending.

We are getting ready to launch more and more.

Just to be transparent with you, the pandemic wiped out the majority of our life teams.

And we had about 10 life teams who made it all the way through.

They've been meeting for years and years.

They have stayed connected.

I'm unbelievably proud.

Recently, we've added a few more life teams who are getting off of the ground, creating that community so people can come together and apply the word into their life.

We need people who are willing to step up and create a home team.

It says that they met in the temple and they met in their homes.

What's that mean?

It means somebody had to open their door, they had to hang a dry towel in the bathroom, they had to get the laundry off of the couch, they had to get their house open, they had to get it ready so that people could come in and not just feel good.

Hey, we got to the temple today.

Check.

We did it, our religious activity for the week.

Check.

People who came together broke bread together and talked about how they were going to change the world together.

Application happens in community.

Our life teams see this.

We asked them to serve or to meet three times a week to work on application of the word into their lives, to actually be in community, to support each other, to hold each other accountable, to love each other, to walk each other through hard things, and then once a month they go and they serve somewhere together.

We help get you organized so you can hit another nonprofit or another serving opportunity in town.

And you guys might not even know it, but there are hundreds of hours of volunteer work being done through Metachurch on almost a monthly basis.

And we're just getting started.

We do not have enough life teams to offer the opportunity of community to the hundreds of people who come here to MetaCurch.

We need life team leaders, and so that's a call to action today.

And here's the deal immediately, some of you both feel the call and have already talked yourself out of it.

Because, you know, if we handed you the mic, you couldn't quote every book of the Bible, you know.

You're like, there's Genesis, there's the one with David, there's the Jesus ones, that's about it.

And it's like, well, I'll let someone with a higher spiritual IQ lead the teams.

Some of you, you're like, I'm too young, I'm not married, I won't have a lot in common.

We have college-age people asking us if we have live teams all the time, and right now we don't.

Some of you are thinking, I'm too old, man.

This is a church with lots of young folks in it.

Let me tell you right now, we have some older folks who aren't exactly interested in our bikes, Bible and beer life team, right?

Where they bike for 10 miles and then go to a brewery.

We need all people because you are the body of Christ.

And so to be a life team leader, it means you're willing to create a second space.

Maybe it's your house, maybe not.

Maybe, maybe it's a park.

Probably not, I mean, in the morning right now, if it's a park, but maybe it's a restaurant.

You open a space, we will train you.

Over the next two months, you're gonna be brought in, you're gonna spend time with Nori, our life team coordinator, you're gonna spend some time with me, you're gonna be brought into the life team leader community, you're gonna be inspired, you're gonna be trained, you're gonna be supported every step of the way.

We need people to step up.

This is a vital, vital part of our movement.

And I want to remind you: if you think that you are not qualified, just read who Jesus picked.

Uneducated fishermen.

You know what it meant to be a professional fisherman?

It meant you failed out of Torah school.

They literally were fishermen, tradesmen, because they didn't know the Bible good enough.

He called Matthew a tax collector.

You know what people said about tax collector?

It was like, hey man, did did you hear about you hear about John's kid?

Yeah.

Grand Larceny.

You know what they would say?

At least he's not a tax collector.

That's what they thought about the tax collectors back then.

Jesus called Matthew a tax collector.

And maybe Jesus is calling you.

If you are at all, at all interested, we're not taking a blood oath today, you know, you're not signing a billion-year contract.

If you are interested, I'm gonna ask you to meet us after service.

If this is gonna matter, this thing we call metachurch, this large local expression made of incredible, powerful, purposeful individuals, if it's gonna matter, then we have to move.

We have to live it out.

And movement, application, purpose, power happens in community.

Would you pray with me?

God, we love you.

And I pray that uh you would just you would move in our hearts, you'd bring us clarity.

God, that we would hold on to what this is.

This is not a meeting.

This isn't just church.

That's not what this is.

This is the gathering of your church to worship, to learn more about you, to get ready, to get filled up, to go out and live for you, to live out our faith, to walk and talk the gospel.

And we need each other.

Not just sitting in rows in a service, sitting in circles with people we know and who care about us, wrestling with our faith, wrestling with you together, actually applying your word in a way that will change the world around us.

We love you.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

You can rate and review or share it with your friends.

If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps.

You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit, and you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

And I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.