We weren’t smart enough to plan this out, but I guess you’d have to say we were sharp enough to recognize it when we fell into it! A couple times a year, we hone our focus as a church around something we sense is a spiritual direction God has for us as a church and then we take all the main or regular stuff we do and turn our attention to that initiative.
So this year, all of our on campus groups, all of our home groups, our weekend services and then we as individuals are diving into the COMMUNITY BIBLE EXPERIENCE!
We had almost 400 NEW PEOPLE JOIN a small group last Wednesday all of which will be Experiencing the scripture together. We’ve sold out of “The Books of the Bible” New Testaments (I think we’ve sold almost 2k).
Last weekend we launched the teaching series EAT THIS BOOK. So as we read the New Testament together, as we wrestle with it in our small groups, we’ll be teaching on it in a series called that helps us to “experience the God OF the Bible, IN the Bible!” So think of it like a 3-legged stool – we’re reading personally, we’re meeting in our small groups around that reading and then we’ll be teaching on all this every weekend for the next few weeks!
Sarah Merk-Benitez cast some vision for what our reading is all about and what it’s not about.
Worship was great but different! Our friend Lindsay Love and her team led us in worship. She is amazingly anointed to bring people into God’s presence in Worship!
Our team thought that it was important as we launched into this season to address the question: Why THIS book? A lot of people at Journey are fairly new to the whole church thing. So it’s a legit question to ask. Is this a reliable document and how does this ancient text relate to my spiritual life or my life life in 2012. Frankly, lots of us have questions like these regardless of how long we’ve been around church.
According the people that put together the New Testament we are using for this series [click here for their website], 4 of 5 people surveyed have NEVER heard God speak to them in the pages of Scripture. We are taking direct aim at that! You really can’t follow Jesus without being immersed in His words and You won’t get very far in your journey with God if you don’t know how to hear Him speak to You in the pages of Scripture.
