A Vision of Flourishing Community

Good morning, Dayspring.

How are we all?

A few of you are great.

How are the rest of you?

Doing well?

Sweating it out?

Hey, I got good news.

I mean, summer's supposed to be over, but it's kind of hanging on, all right?

I got good news.

We've got new air conditioning coming.

Just in time for the end of summer, which is amazing.

Amazing.

It's hopefully a month or two away.

It'll do reverse cycle as well, so it'll do heating.

And if you have been here, we do okay with the heating and cooling.

When this air conditioner here hasn't been working, we're getting a whole new system in, and it's going to do supposedly a really, really good job, and we should have much better heating and cooling here.

So come on, give a cheer, because that's worth...

celebrating any a few more Sundays of sweating or shivering it through and actually fun fact the one of the fastest growing churches in New York at the moment pastored by John Tyson they've just done New York winter without heating so they don't have a building they rent spaces and whatnot the spaces they've been in no heating and get this no working toilets and

And so if you want to go to the bathroom, you've got to go outside of the building in the freezing cold, like a New York winter is like a proper winter, right?

But it's one of the fastest growing churches in New York right now, despite all that.

So I feel that we can toughen up a little bit here as Australians and get through the last of the rematch.

Neil's shaking his head.

He can't do it.

He can't do it.

All right.

I won't even say, you can do it, Neil.

Let's give him some encouragement.

Come on, Neil, you can do it.

A couple of other things as well.

We have foundations, as Sean mentioned, straight after the service.

If you haven't registered, it's not too late.

That's for all those who are new.

Today's spring, we'd love to meet you, introduce you to some of our team and pastors and share a little bit about the heart of our church.

We also have young adults this Thursday night.

coming up.

So if you're the age of 18 to 25-ish, we're inviting you here to be a part of our Young Adults Connect, which is happening here Thursday night, 7pm.

And Will, why don't you just give us a quick wave.

There he is, Will Bargs, and you can see him for more information, if you will.

Make sure you say goodbye to Emma and Luke and Eliza and Rachel as well.

We're going to read from Acts chapter 2.

Are you ready for the Word this morning?

All right, we're going to read from Acts 2, verse 1 through to 6, and it says this.

Everyone say, "'One place.'"

All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

Now they were staying in Jerusalem, God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven.

And when they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment because each one heard their own language being spoken.

Utterly amazed, they asked, aren't all those who are speaking Galileans?

And down to verse 12, amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, what does this mean?

Hey, why don't we pray before we gather around the Word this morning?

Well, Lord, we thank You for the gift of community.

We thank You for the privilege it is to be able to come together, stir one another up, gather under Your Name and lift up the Name of Jesus, not just over this community and over our own lives, but collectively over our city and over our nation.

Lord, we pray that You would be glorified.

Jesus, we give You the room.

We pray that it would be a cool room in Jesus' name.

And everyone said?

Amen.

Prayers too for Oscar Piastri today and Liverpool tonight.

All right, now on to more serious things.

Last week, our amazing table community team who was here for last week, Chris and Sarah and Kristen, they laid out how we are going to engage in community here at Dayspring.

And didn't they do a great job?

Can we give them a round of applause?

Go back and listen to that if you haven't had a chance to.

It was encouraging to see the response from you all during the week.

And we are giving you an opportunity this week to sign up as well.

And so you can scan that QR code or this will be on the screens at the end of the service as well and in the foyer.

You can go see our hub.

We want to give you an opportunity to sign up.

sign up if you haven't yet we did ask you to go away and pray and consider how you might be a part and we also recognize too that there are seasons and times and maybe some of you are you know what that is something I would love to do but it's it's for another time it's for another season and that's more than okay sometimes you know what I'm going to give you permission not all the time but sometimes it's okay just to sit and receive and get maybe you're in a place of healing in a place of restoration you just need to soak up all that God has for you and say that's okay

We want you to take that time.

And if that's what God's on for this season of life, then you have full permission.

But we would also encourage if you feel stirred up to press in.

I mean, we need community.

And so for some of you, you will have the capacity and you will also feel God's prompting.

You know what?

This is something that I need to be a part of.

And so we would encourage you to join the many that have already signed up to be a part of Table Communities.

Amen.

This week, I want to dig a little deeper into, or a little bit deeper into the why behind table communities, the heart behind community here at Dayspring.

Why is community so important?

Why does it matter so much to us as your leaders?

Why does it matter so much to God, this idea of community?

Let me start with this quote from Christian counsellor, author and teacher, Larry Crabb.

He wrote a great book called The Connecting Church.

He says,

We can get by for a while on size, skilled communication and programs to meet every need.

But unless we sense that we belong to each other with masks off, the vibrant church of today will become the powerless church of tomorrow.

It's quite a sobering thought.

We need true community.

And the idea of community, true community, is what we see here in Acts 2, the birth of the church community.

It says, Now that word together is a word that means one heart, one mind, or one passion.

And so what we are talking about when we are talking about community and looking at the example of the early church is more than just a gathering.

One place, one accord.

One place and one accord.

It means it's not just about being in the same place together.

It's how we are in that same place together.

It might be the difference between turning up and showing up.

Turning up is what's required of us when we go to a concert or we go to a sporting event.

We turn up to consume and be entertained.

Often, in these kind of environments, we turn up not as we really are, but with masks on, being the people we think we need to be in order to belong to this group.

The true community is not about turning up, but showing up.

That is what's required of us here.

It's what God asks of us.

No masks, no pretending.

Here I am.

This is me, and I am present, ready to engage, to create, and to contribute.

I want to stop and pause a little bit because I think hats off to some heroes in our community who show up in a way that is stunning, beautiful and costly.

And that's to all our mums with young babies.

We just want to acknowledge

and celebrate you.

We know that at times it's difficult.

You're only hearing snippets of the message, lifting one arm up while juggling your baby with the other arm in worship, in and out, all the different challenges that come.

And so I think we can do a much better job.

Church, we honour all of our mums with young babies this morning and say thank you for showing up

The idea of being of one accord, or we might use the word oneness, means that this community in Acts 2 and this community here in the room this morning is not just any kind of community.

Firstly, it's a community that was seated in prayer by Jesus himself the night before he was arrested.

Here's what we read in John 17.

My prayer is not for them alone.

I pray for those also who will believe in me, that's you and me, through their message, that all of them may be one Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.

May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

Maybe we should say that Acts 2 wasn't the birth of the church, but John 17, when Jesus prayed in faith, looking down through history and into the future of what would happen.

This is the seeds of prayer, the seeds of the church being established in prayer.

And he's praying for oneness.

He's praying for community.

Now, if you are at all familiar with Jewish tradition, or if you've watched The Chosen, hands up if you've watched The Chosen, you might recognise that Jesus is actually taking inspiration from a prayer called, a Jewish prayer called the Shema.

Or maybe, I don't know, is it pronounced the Shema?

Sounds more right.

Shema.

It was prayed morning and night.

It was often the last words that...

They would pray before going to bed at night.

Here is that prayer.

You imagine being a Jewish man or woman, hearing or reading this prayer from Jesus, making that connection, because they would have made the connection.

They had been praying this prayer since they could speak.

They'd been hearing this prayer, prayed by their parents and their community every single day.

Then all of a sudden they catch.

What Jesus is saying in this prayer, that oneness that they've been acknowledging, that prayer of worship, acknowledging the glory and the wonder and the nature of our God as one.

And all of a sudden, this prayer is inviting us into that oneness that they've been praying through every single day of their life.

It would have blown their minds.

Wait a minute.

this oneness that we've been worshipping about and acknowledging our God about, we are being invited into that same oneness.

Yes, you are.

And so are we.

We're invited into the oneness of the Trinity, who for us is an example of pure, perfect unity.

And this Trinity is a picture for how our lives are to be lived as one.

The oneness that we've been invited to hear and the oneness that we've been invited to share in the nature of God.

Why is community so important?

Because it is the very nature of the God we serve.

If you were to get to the ultimate reality of who God is and His nature, you would find a loving community of persons with one another.

And that means if this is what God is like, and you and I, we are created to and invited to become more and more like Jesus, like this God that we worship.

If we are image bearers, then we must move towards community.

We cannot understand God.

We cannot understand ourselves and we cannot understand the story that we are living out of without understanding community, which is why the New Testament authors and writers spend so much time talking about it.

We're gonna tune in here to what Paul says in Ephesians 4.

Listen to this.

And again, if you can capture this same idea of the Shema being prayed, there is one body and one spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called.

One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God, one Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.

Seven times Paul says the word one.

Pretty subtle.

The oneness of our God is working oneness into us.

It's what Paul is saying.

The oneness of the Trinity is working oneness into us, which means that Christian community first is something we receive before it becomes something that we build.

It's something that we receive.

It's a reality that exists in God before we existed, before humanity existed.

And it's a reality that you and I have been invited into.

It's a grace that we get to participate in.

Eugene Peterson says this, the underlying and all-encompassing oneness that is church flows from the underlying and all-encompassing oneness that is God.

Are you with me?

In 1 John 4, we read that God is love.

I was waiting for you to finish.

God is love.

The Apostle John gives God a name, agape.

God is agape.

He is supreme, sacrificial, self-giving love.

And if you were to study the biblical Greek, like our friend at Russell, you would discover that there's a communal expression of this sort of love.

It's the word koinonia, which means shared agape.

Okay.

Well, the concept, at least behind the word koinonia, is the concept of shared agape.

Not just between a couple of individuals, but within a community.

It speaks to who we are.

It's often translated as the word fellowship.

And it taps into this idea of oneness.

Here's the Apostle John using this word in this Scripture.

We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have faith.

fellowship koinonia shared agape with us and our shared agape is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ all this to say that God is family and that you and I have been invited into this family

Philip Yancey in his book, Vanishing Grace, he sums up or at least attempts to sum up the biblical narrative and the biblical story in a single sentence.

And he says this, the biblical story is God getting his family back.

If you were to read Scripture and not see that message, then we are simply reading it with the wrong lens.

It is a story of God getting His family back.

You and I participating as sons and daughters.

And when we participate in the family of God, when we participate in family, we are literally participating in God, abiding in His presence in the Trinity and the shared glory of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

That is not something we have to wait for.

And that is something that should get us excited.

It should get us out of bed at about seven o'clock in the morning so that we can get ready and get here on time and be a part of, because we get to participate.

in this beautiful thing called community, which isn't just a social gathering built around my preference.

You guys don't all go for the same sporting or team as me.

You don't have the same interest.

You like different movies.

You like doing different things.

But more than a shared preference or a common interest, we have this beautiful gift of community that we've been grafted into and there is life and flourishing when we gather.

All right, I'm getting excited.

I'll preach to myself.

I'm quite happy to do that.

Church is more than just a collection of individuals attending the same weekly event.

Huddles, table communities.

Do you like what I did there with the H?

Huddles.

That's that bit of Jewishness just sticking on.

It's more than just a midweek catch up.

These things that we are doing, it's community.

It's a community of people participating in the very life of God as we learn to sacrificially love one another.

We're pulling on this idea of family.

We're pulling it out of the pages of Scriptures and we're giving life to it.

We're living it out as a testimony for the world around us.

When we talk about community, this is what we mean.

A Spirit-filled, new creation family of people abiding in the oneness of the Trinity, living in and releasing a heaven and earth reality.

Amen.

In the time we have left, let's dig deeper into Acts 2.

I want to have a look at three big ideas.

I'm going to try and move through this very, very quickly because I can see that the heat is fatiguing you all.

But can we encourage Neil again to push on through?

Three big ideas.

The first one is this, power.

Everyone say power.

Power.

We need communities.

Spirit-filled communities that pursue, carry, and release the power of God.

Can I get a Pentecostal amen?

Come on, we see this in Acts 2.

It says all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.

And of course, we know how the rest of the book of Acts plays out.

The power of heaven being released on earth.

The resurrection power of God resting upon a people and being released through a people.

In our day, right here, right now, we need to be a people, we need to be a church, a community that is filled with and carries the power and the wisdom of God.

Amen?

We cannot do this on our own.

The gifts that we carry are not enough without the power and the wisdom of God.

Jesus gave His disciples a mission.

This is what you are to do.

Follow me, be an example, follow my example.

He says, but wait, you're gonna have to wait.

I've got amazing things for you to accomplish and got plans for you and a purpose for you, but you're going to have to wait for my Spirit to come.

You're going to have to wait and pray for the power of God to come and fall upon you and fill you.

We are no different.

We must be a people who know how to wait, pray, tap into this power of heaven that has been placed within every single one of us, the power of God that's been promised to come and baptise us so that we can carry it out into our world.

Wherever you are in life, no matter how long you've been a Christian for, no matter how many miracles you've seen, we all need to be pursuing

power of God in our lives.

Do you know what happens when the power of God leaves the church of God?

It's this crazy story that's often missed in Mark chapter 9, or at least this section of it is missed.

Jesus comes down from His transfiguration moment with three of His disciples, Peter, James, and John, and He comes down to find quite the scene going on.

And

And what's happening here is this father has brought his son who's unwell.

In fact, he's demon possessed.

And this is manifesting in forms of fits.

And the disciples prayed for this young boy, but they couldn't see freedom or deliverance.

And so the father instead brings him to Jesus now that Jesus has returned.

And Jesus prays and the young boy is delivered.

And the disciples then, knowing what's up, come to him afterwards and they say, well, what's going on?

Why couldn't we see this boy healed and set free?

And Jesus says, this kind, this kind will only come out through prayer and fasting or through prayer.

This kind requires a different kind, a new level of power that you've yet to tap into.

And that power is tapped in through prayer.

If we go back up a little bit to a few verses earlier, what Jesus actually comes down to is an argument between the disciples and the religious leaders.

They're arguing.

without arguing about, we're not really too sure, but something around or about the idea of this young boy not being healed.

Here's the lesson that we can pull from the pages of Scripture for us today.

When the power of God is absent, we'll find ourselves arguing with each other instead of doing the thing that we're called to do and confronting the issues of our day.

I don't know about you, but I see a lot of arguing happening within the church.

Arguing about politics and ideology and who's right and who's wrong and how we should approach certain things.

That says to me that maybe, just maybe, that we're lacking the power to confront the issues and the challenges of our day.

And that we need the power of God to fall on us as a people once more.

We need the wisdom of God so that we can challenge, confront, and bring healing and redemption.

to the things that we are facing.

The disciples learn the lesson, because guess what happens in Acts chapter 4?

In Acts chapter 4, we find the disciples again confronted and challenged by the issues of their day.

They were locked up and persecuted for preaching the gospel and seeing a lame man healed.

What do they do?

We've experienced this before.

We're not going to fight amongst ourselves.

What do they do in Acts chapter 4?

They pray until the building shakes.

They pray again and they ask that God would give them power and boldness and courage to preach the gospel and to bring the kingdom in the midst of challenge, confrontation and the issues of their day.

And let me just say right off the bat, we're talking about flourishing, we're talking about community and table communities and getting involved.

They must not be just a social gathering.

We must be a people that are hungry for, praying for and receiving and stewarding and releasing the

power of God to bring wisdom, redemption and restoration to the issues of our day.

Amen.

We must pray.

We need the power of God.

But here's something else.

Because Acts 2 isn't the whole story.

Or Acts 2, 1-7 that we read isn't the whole story.

Further on down, we read these words.

Now, Lord.

Actually, no, I skipped that.

That's Acts 4, just so you know.

I was quoting the Bible.

There you go.

There's that other verse.

There you go.

Quoting the Bible.

Acts 2.

It says this,

And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

I'm praying for the day where the church once again leaves the crowd, the community, the city that it's occupying bewildered and utterly amazed.

But more than the power of God, we need to be a people of discipline and practice.

Here's what happens.

The early church received power, the Holy Spirit fell, but then they were able to engage in tangible practices so that that power was pushed out into the world in a way that translated and was received as the love of God.

The power of God being expressed through the love of God because the people took up practices that would form them and shape them and enable to go out and represent Jesus in a Christ-like way.

Discipline and practice became the way that the power of God was translated into community so that community wasn't just the place of encounter, but a place of transformation.

The power of God is good, necessary and needed, but without formation, it can be destructive.

Paul talks about this.

The power of God in 1 Corinthians and the church in Corinth was being channeled through mere infants.

And this was causing problems.

And he addressed it and he says, you need to grow up and become mature.

And what did he call this maturity?

He called it agape.

He called it love.

You need to learn love.

In your community, you need to learn love.

Why?

So that the power of God that is evident and moving and working amongst you could be pushed through you in a Christ-like way.

Because right now, you're just a noisy gong.

We need to pray for the power of God.

We need to do the hard work of forming our hearts and our lives so that we can steward it well.

Amen.

We will flourish in this kind of environment, kind of atmosphere that holds these two things in tension, power and practice, fire and form, love and liturgy.

The New Testament church was not built on beliefs alone.

They put their beliefs into practice.

They didn't just talk about it.

They did the Jesus stuff.

We can pray for the life of Jesus and the love of Jesus and the power of Jesus all we want.

But if we don't have the lifestyle of Jesus, it will either blow us up or someone else.

Is this making sense?

We see here that the Lord, what does it say?

Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts and they broke bread in their homes.

The Christian community here we can see is both the temple and the table.

It's the gathering like this, but it's the table community and the huddle gatherings as well.

The temple and the table both are required for healthy Christian community.

Formational space looks different.

As good and as beautiful as Sunday gatherings are, these gatherings are not really built or designed for deep heart level transformation.

We need something else.

We need the groups of 12 and the groups of three.

We need to be able to do life with one another and get to that level of intimacy where we're holding each other account and provoking, as Paul says in the Scriptures, provoking one another and stimulating

stirring one another up and encouraging.

And that can happen here to a certain degree, but it happens at a whole deeper level when we gather in our homes together, when we gather in our twos and threes and we have those close friends that are gonna go, you know what?

I just wanna challenge you about what you just said because I feel that you're missing the call of God here or can I just call you up in grace to a higher level?

We need those kind of friendships, do we not?

And so we need the table.

I'm fast running out of time.

What am I gonna say and what am I gonna leave out?

This word table is one that we've used intentionally.

You would have heard us talk about it over and over and again.

It's part of our story here at Dayspring.

The reason why we have communion the way we do is because we create a table moment.

And even though we don't have physical tables, we turn to one another.

We have a table posture.

Or breaking bread and sharing the cup together.

And when we ask you to pray for different things, it's not just the person on the front praying.

We ask you to find two or three others to pray because we're creating what?

A table moment.

There is, you know, all through Scripture, we see this table imagery because it communicates not just to something that we are to do, but fundamentally to how we were created.

Not to consume, but to commune.

Not to just sit here in a moment like this and receive, but to contribute and to give of ourselves and to receive as others give of their selves.

Ephesians 4.3, I'm just gonna kind of just push through this as I can and we'll see how it lands, all right?

Ephesians 4.3 says this,

to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.

And so we've already said how the unity of the Spirit, so the unity is a work of the Spirit, it's a grace, but it's also work.

We receive the gift of community.

and the grace, and we put it to work, make every effort.

So we have a part to play.

It's a grace we receive, but it's also a grit that we grind out as we do life together.

Grace and grit is this idea of community.

It's a relational discipline.

The table will require something of you.

When you're considering joining a huddle or a table community, you're gonna have to consider the cost.

And you know what?

The cost might be easy the first couple of times in, but then someone's going to come along and they're going to sit next to you and they're going to really annoy you.

Trust me, it'll happen.

It's only a matter of time.

That's the grit of community, where you can look past.

You know what's really happening is your own prejudice, perhaps, or close heart is being exposed, right?

So there's grace, but there's also grit.

I've been reading this beautiful book by David Brooks.

It's called How to Know a Person.

He says that in life that there are diminishers and illuminators.

Diminishers are people who make others around them feel small and unseen.

They are too caught up in their own sense of importance to see others.

So you might recognise a diminisher in your life.

You may recognise how you've been a diminisher.

Often diminishers talk more than they listen.

And he quotes George Bernard Shaw, who says this, Indifference is the essence of inhumanity.

But then he talks about illuminators.

Turn to the person next to you and say, you are an illuminator.

Illuminators have a persistent curiosity about other people.

A persistent curiosity about

The difference between an illuminator and a diminisher is that an illuminator has trained themselves or they have been trained in the craft of seeing and understanding others.

They have taken it upon themselves to learn a craft of being present, of listening and really seeing another person.

He uses this word, this German word.

Again, you're gonna get to laugh at my pronunciation.

this word here, and it's beautiful what it means.

There's no word in English maybe that means this, and so he uses this German word.

It's called Herzenbildung.

That's it there.

Any Germans want to give a better stab at pronouncing that?

Herzenbildung, building.

And it means this, Isn't it a beautiful word?

Training one's heart to see the full humanity in another.

I think one of the most powerful, creative things that we can do is learning to see the other.

Because when you see me or when I see you for who you truly are, something in you comes alive that wasn't alive before.

It's how flourishing happens within a community when I see you in a way that you haven't yet learned to see yourself.

And we're able to call out the gold and the potential in one another.

In how you see me, I will learn to see myself.

And that places a lot of responsibility on each of us.

In how you see me, I will learn to see myself.

This is why we believe in, this is why we need the practice of the table.

Because the practice of the table is what helps us to train our hearts to fully see the other.

Amen?

If we get these two things right, this is what happens.

If I could have the keyboard player up.

Power.

You're ready to go.

Well done, Sharon.

Everyone give Sharon a round of applause.

part of the special case that we love so much.

Power, practice, and the last thing that we see when we get those two things right is the prophetic.

Now, when I say prophetic, I don't mean prophesying.

I mean witness, a prophetic witness to the world around us.

That, of course, can include prophesying.

We have to understand when God's Spirit fell in Acts 2, a new kind of community, a community that wasn't possible before, a community that had never been seen before was birthed.

Same disciples, same group of people, same gathering, yet in an instant they became something that the earth had never seen or known.

community of Spirit-filled sons and daughters, carrying the very DNA of heaven and their Father, being grafted into the Trinity, perfect community and unity, and charged with the responsibility and mission of releasing a new kind of love on their world.

What happens?

I think the first response that we see out of the lips of those watching and seeing what was playing out, they said this, amazed and perplexed.

What does this mean?

They were a prophetic witness that Jesus in His death and resurrection had started something new, something beautiful, something that was going to bring healing and redemption to our world.

N.T.

Wright says this, When the church is acting as the church, as a small working model of new creation, new creation calls time on the power brokers of the old creation.

It tells Caesars and Herod and every modern equivalent of Caesar and Herod that they are not God and that God is God.

That they are not Lord and that Jesus is Lord.

That they are not powerful and God's Spirit is powerful.

New Testament church, new creation community, you and I are calling time on the powers of the old way.

You are no longer in charge.

There is a new Lord.

There is a new King.

There is a new way.

That is our prophetic witness.

That is our responsibility.

You and I, every time we gather, as we gather, understanding all this, we are calling time on the governing powers that are having influence and a say over our city.

that are infiltrating our education system and our universities and our government, trying to lead and influence them away from God.

When we lift up the name of Jesus and sing what a beautiful name it is, we are calling time on that power, saying you no longer have influence in our world.

We, the people of God.

We are a prophetic witness to what is happening and to what is coming.

The way we love one another, Jesus says this in John, is a prophetic witness.

By your love for one another, we will be known.

Now, I want to say this in closing, kind of.

I want to say this in closing.

Because there's one more thing that the New Testament church teaches us that often we forget and preachers like me sometimes forget to mention.

They were far from perfect.

We can learn from them.

We can see, hey, they had power and then there was practice and they were prophetic witness.

Eugene Peterson says this.

You can't have a message from me without quotes from Eugene Peterson.

He says this, after he finished translating the entire Bible in the message paraphrase, he concluded this, there were no successful congregations in Scripture.

Not one got it right.

And of course, if you are familiar with Paul's letters, you will see conflict, segregation, incest, drunkenness during the church service, false teaching, ignoring the poor, injustice, all kinds of things.

We tend to romanticise the past and we have to get back to the church.

Well, we can learn things from the early church, but they were just as messed up as we are.

But here's the lesson.

The church we want can become the enemy of the church we have.

Or another way of saying this might be the greatest enemy to who this church is meant to be is probably the church you or I think it should be.

Until we can learn to love one another in our mess, in our incomplete, underwhelming and apathetic, sometimes frustrating state, then we cannot become who God has made us to be.

We cannot be the church that we are meant to be.

Oh, I love you when you clean yourself up.

I love you when you fix yourself.

That thing that annoys me, I love you when you deal with that.

No, no, no, no, no.

That's not church community.

Can I finish with a personal story?

I'm going to do it anyway.

I've grown up all my life in church community.

If anyone knows how beautiful and how painful church can be, I do.

Church has encouraged me.

Church has wounded me.

It has given me life.

but it has also taken life from me.

I have seen some messed up situations.

I've received some messed up emails.

I was saying that to get your sympathy.

What I am doing is painting a picture.

I believe in church despite its weaknesses and failures.

I believe in this gift and maybe more so today than I ever have before.

Six months ago, you might remember that I went, Kristen and I went on sabbatical.

It took three months off.

It was supposed to be two.

Yeah, it took two months off.

What only a few people know is that two and a bit weeks into that sabbatical, I started suffering severe panic attacks.

One that took me to hospital because I thought that I was dying.

This is it.

Finally got my sabbatical and

Now I'm going to heaven.

Literally thought.

And so I thought, okay, well, that's just a blip.

I know what this is now.

I think this must be a panic attack.

And so I get cool.

Dealt with that.

And then on the plane, I'm ready to go to New Zealand with a trip to the kids and we're about to take off and I'm about to be that guy that grounds everybody else and keeps people from going on their holiday because again, I start having a panic attack.

And on and on, these panic attacks kept coming up.

And just when I thought that I had dealt with it, I was overwhelmed by, I had no idea where this fear, and it was, if anyone here has suffered from it, it was, I have never really been a person who's stressed out much or worried or got anxious, but all of a sudden I was crippled by fear that was just, I'm a very logical person, it's not logical.

You know what I am so, so thankful for?

And maybe this is the biggest reason that I'm here today preaching.

Community.

Community, my wife, my kids, my parents.

Joel and Russell who said, you need another month off.

And even in the midst of their own drama and struggle and different things that they're going through, they gave us the gift of an extra month because they recognised the need for it.

So, so thankful for you both and for your families for carrying that load.

But I remember the conversation with Joel and he just grilled right in, what is going on?

And

Thankful for the gift of a friend who was able to listen and be there in that moment and understand what was happening and then respond in a way with grace and kindness that would give me space to heal and recover.

Thankful for our board and our staff, although most of them don't know this.

Thankful for professionals.

And thank you for a relationship I already had with a psychologist and a spiritual director.

He was able to help me understand what was happening and how to walk through it.

And thank you for Peter McHugh who had gone through a similar thing.

All of this to say is we need each other.

We need each other.

And I think we have to push past the days of old where we sit beside the same person week out and don't even know their name.

the person in front of you, the person behind you.

We need to learn to see each other.

We need to train our hearts to be present and to see the other clearly.

That is the gift of grace that we've been given.

The opportunity we all have.

to receive community, create community, carry this thing to the ends of the earth.

Amen.

Why don't we stand on our feet?

Let's just close our eyes and

Hold out our hands, ready to receive.

Lord Jesus, help.

Help us to recognize the value and the gift of community, to receive it as grace.

Would you give us also the strength to put it to work, to make every effort to see this beautiful gift of community grow and flourish.

Train our hearts, Holy Spirit, to see one another clearly, to hold space for each other.

to be one another's encouragement, strength and to support, to be one another's spurring on and challenge one another to enter into and take hold of all that You have for us.

And Lord, for those of us here right now who we are struggling, we feel alone, we feel disconnected, I pray right now here in this moment that there would be a strong reminder and sense of Your grace that we do indeed belong.

Lord, you give us the courage to drop our masks, to be real.

For anyone who might be going through a hard time, similar maybe to my own testimony, Lord, may the gift of community bring healing.

May the gift of community bring restoration.

In Jesus' name we pray.

And everyone said, Amen.

Amen.