Last Night's Conversation

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Wow--cool times at our weekly conversation last night! As we work our way through the book of Acts, the Holy Spirit continues to weave us closer and closer together as a community of faith. Are we trying to recreate the Acts 2 church? Certainly not-we're not recent Christian converts from Judaism living in the 1st century. What we ARE is a community of believers in Jesus who live in and around Mt. Juliet, TN in a post-Christian 21st century--so what we ARE trying to do is let God shape us into whatever He thinks that should look like. So as we engage in conversation about the early church in Acts, we strive to learn from them, not become them.

As we set out to discuss specifically Acts 2:42-47, the "official" flow of conversation (at least how it looked on my notes) was quickly deviated from. This is what I always hope to happen, seeing as how my notes/thoughts/questions are prepared just in case it doesn't! lol. We quickly became involved in discussion about how we could serve (and find) the allusive, emerging generations who mostly flee to Nashville or Lebanon on the weekends fearing complete and utter boredom if remaining in Mt. Juliet. Brittany, inspired by the Holy Spirit, provided a wonderful idea for Saturday, June 18th...a garage sale--in which everything is free! So, if you'd like to donate any items to give away email me. On this same day we'll be handing out ice cold bottles of water at the garage sale and at some other places around town where folks tend to get awfully thirsty.

As the conversation continued, Greg posed the question, "how could we answer someone when they ask something like, 'what is your church like?'" What a wonderful question! And on many levels--I have no freakin' idea how to respond! The vision God has given us as a community of faith can't be judged by any of the current measuring sticks ("buildings, budgets, and bodies"). Since that question carries with it MANY presuppositions, we decided that the best probable response would be a question(s) that encourage conversation where we can learn what the individual's needs are, what they already think about church, religion, God, and Jesus, and etc. We thought these conversation inspiring questions would be better than talking for 10 minutes about the "vision" or "values" or whatever--all that can come later, but it's not most important...

So as you can see, great conversation last week--I guess the overall theme (again) seemed to have been how can we be church, not just do church. Hmm...I'm starting to get the hint God.