It’s a little hard to explain what this “JESUS CREED” thing is. It’s a series. It’s a personal devotional. It’s six weeks of small groups. It’s 21 Days of Fasting and Prayer. It’s 24/7 PRAYER. Yup, it’s all that!
A LITTLE HISTORY: A few years ago I read a great book by Scot McKnight called “THE JESUS CREED.” Since then I’ve read several of his books and got to meet Scot when he was in SD and came to a Journey service to hear our mutual friend Mark Oestreicher preach. Some time last year in a staff meeting Sarah Merk shared that both the college and 20-something ministries are studying the Jesus Creed and writing some Journey-specific curriculum to kick off 2011. We began to talk, think and pray about it and concluded that it would be good for our whole church to focus on the focus of Jesus TOGETHER! It kept evolving to what we are into right now. And I’m stoked about it.
THE JESUS CREED: When asked what the most important commandment in all the Law, three times Jesus basically said that the center of authentic life with God is the Shema (the “HEAR” of “Hear O Israel…” in Deuteronomy 6:4ff). But then He had the gall (chutzpa) to MESS WITH THE SHEMA! He actually added a verse out of Leviticus (“love your neighbor as yourself”) of all places and said that these TWO commandments are what the whole rest of the Bible hangs on. So we’ll be taking six weeks to explore what this means for us.
40 DAYS OF LIVING THE JESUS CREED – at the same time about 1000 of us are using the devotion that goes with Scot’s J Creed book. It’s essentially 40 daily readings all on this theme.
“US IT UP!” – We are also leveraging this series to stoke the small groups fire. For the next 6 weeks you can go to any group at Journey and more or less know what’s up. You can join an existing group and be a part of the dozens of new groups that are forming. Our JC rally got this jumpstarted. It was cool!
LOTS O PRAYER – Underneath, over and in between is 24/7 PRAYER & 21 DAYS OF PRAYER & FASTING.
What’s been so great is to see people taking risks, to see them launching into new places, to see them stretching to get more of God. There’s something stirring at Journey. It seems like God is saying to a lot of us at the same time, “Hey, it’s time to take a step, to dive in, to jump off that cliff… ready…JUMP!”
