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“Love your neighbor as yourself” is one of Jesus’ most famous quotations, but it often does not get the depth of understanding it deserves. We understand this command today as simple, trite, and easy, but Jesus understood this as a kind of dedication to others that would not just take a retweet, a post, or even a two-hour service project—it would take up our entire habit of mind. When we follow the context of this teaching from Jesus, we find ourselves in the strange book of Leviticus, discovering that this is not an isolated, trite command, but a summation of many commands that appropriately demand our attention.

The Christian life can often feel like an enormous add on: what do I need to do on top of everything else I’m already doing in order to be right with God? But Jesus’ primary command to us is to love God with our whole life—heart, soul, mind, and strength. The command is a quote from an Old Testament passage that illuminates for us what this kind of whole-life love will mean. This week, we’ll see how we can’t love God with everything we’ve got without considering everyone we know. Loving God is a community project.

What happens when you can’t see the end? What do you do when you have no estimated time of arrival? Right now, many of us are waiting: waiting for justice, waiting for peace, waiting for healing, waiting for normalcy, for reconciliation, for hope…we are a people waiting. How can we wait well and what can we do while waiting for all of these things? Join us as we conclude the book of James and learn the art of waiting well when the end is not in sight.

Join us this weekend to hear how the early church prayed when they were faced with opposition. How when they came face to face with power trying to shut down the spread of the gospel, instead of praying for protection or even removal of their enemy, they prayed for boldness.

Social restoration is cultivated by followers of Jesus sowing peace as true social wisdom.

Social restoration requires followers of Jesus to do the heart work to bring about redemptive social language 

 What you truly believe is bleeds in how you actually behave. 

We don't just want to return to our old ways of relating and waste or crisis. We want to use this as an opportunity to hit the reset button and restore a Gospel vision of community. Join us for our new 4-part series out of the book of James, Social Restoration. 

Baptism is long understood as the first step of becoming a follower of Jesus. When we are baptized, we go under the water to symbolize the death of our old self, and are then brought out of the water as an image of the new life we’re given in Jesus. It is the outward expression of the inward reality. But how can we understand baptism during a time of social distance and isolation? How should we practice it and why it is important? Join us as we discover the importance and necessity of baptism, and how we might practice it during these strange times. 

Because it has been around for so long, it’s easy for us to lose the meaning of communion—or struggling with the meaning all together. Why do we take it? Why is it important? And now, during a global pandemic where most churches are online, communion seems to be something on the back burner of most worship services. But as we move forward as a church, we want to bring the communion meal into focus by preparing our minds, hearts, and homes to receive the bread and the cup during this time, in order that we might remember Jesus’s broken body and shed blood.

Resiliency is the ability to withstand or recover from a difficult situation. Aldous Huxley once wrote, "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him." In the final installment of our series Resilient, we are going to discover there are very specific spiritual practices resilient people engage in every day regardless of their circumstances.