There are some weekends, which can be stretching, but when Sunday night rolls around, you just lie down and smile. You can almost feel the “Kingdom ball” moving down the field.
OUR JOURNEY TURBO – Our process to help people get “in” at Journey starts with a lunch meeting the FIRST SUNDAY OF EVERY MONTH, called FIRST STEP (clever name). This is kind of “intro to Journey – Values, DNA, our pastors. We encourage people to then to dive into a 5 Sunday at 11:00 class / experience called OUR JOURNEY. You could think of Our J as “intro to life with Jesus at Journey.” For those that for whatever reason fined it hard to do 5 Sunday classes (involved somewhere, travel plans), a few times a year we do the entire OUR JOURNEY on a Friday night and Saturday that has come to be known as OUR JOURNEY TURBO! That was this weekend. We have great connectors involved, great discussion leaders and fantastic content. This weekend was one of our great TURBO weekends. This is probably our most important ministry development over the past 3 years. I love it!
RE*ENGAGE SERIES – This weekend we continue our thinking about “Sacrament”. We talked specifically about the sign of BAPTISM. Of course you can’t miss when you show our baptism video.
We walked through some of the key statements about “Baptism” in the New Testament and how it is one of God’s huge signs of INVITATION to RE*ENGAGE.
One of the difficult things about a message like this is how easy it is to get confused about the role of baptism in salvation. There’s been widespread teaching that somehow baptism is part of the basis for being justified by God. Actually the New Testament in general and Paul in particular are insistent that trusting in Jesus is the SOLE basis upon which one can be right with God. But it was almost automatic that those who trusted Christ were dunked in water as a sacrament and sign that they were identifying with Jesus, His people and His mission. The great New Testament scholar F.F. Bruce in his commentary on Romans 6 said, “The thought of an unbaptized Christian in the New Testament was simply not entertained.”
Of course all this leads up to this coming Sunday’s BEACH BAPTISM! Don’t miss it!
