There is so much in and around this weekend, exciting and challenging that in some ways I felt like I crawled in to the worship center. But wouldn’t you know, the services ended up being exactly what I needed. I know, that’s not the point and we try to not plan services that are about our own or certainly MY needs, but we also don’t think we are outside performers doing a show for the “audience”. It’s more like we’re members of a community or a body, pointing and leading to a place we are all going.
MESSAGE
In our “Glorious Mess” series we are teaching through the New Testament book called 1 Corinthians. It’s a specific correspondence from the Apostle Paul to a church that he started in the Greek city of Corinth. Corinth was not a place you would necessarily expect the message of Jesus to gain traction but it did. But this isn’t legendary church; it’s real church as in real messy church. This week we came to the end of the first section of the letter and the surface issue was the Corinthian tendency to divide into camps based on who their favorite celebrity teacher / preacher was. The real issue is the immaturity of their life with God; they were still basically living in their cultural patterns with some Jesus sauce smeared over the whole mess calling it “Christ-Following”. In chapter four, you can distill the discussion down to 2 words: GINORMOUS CENTER. Paul was living his life and was inviting, cajoling, challenging, encouraging them to live their lives around Jesus as a dense, weighty, massive center dwarfing everything else. So that our little comparisons and factions aren’t just “wrong” but ridiculous.
COMMUNION
So of course we did communion crowded into the center – lets let our body location speak to our heart.
WORSHIP
Worship was nails for me this weekend. Loved our string section!
NEXT WEEKEND
We’ll be looking at chapter 5. It should be an uncomfortable lesson in how we live out what we call the “Kingdom Values Approach” to church. If you don’t know what that means and you are you are a part of Journey, you need to take FIRST STEPS. It’s one of our DNA descriptors that we go over in that experience.
