Topic: Church

It is as members of the body that you are given the gifts that are needed for this body to serve in this time and this place.

Good gossip, listening in love to each other’s stories and seeking the presence of God, helps us to build connection and community and to grow in love.

It is in our woundedness, this woundedness we try to avoid and would rather not acknowledge, that we find our identity as the body of Christ, our identity as the church.

We are not added to a particular church flock in order to be in the “right” group, but in order to learn, with Christ, to love others and lay down our lives for the world.

We are a ragtag bunch, but in witnessing to God’s mercy and love, we become the people of God together.

God’s mission is much bigger than us, and to play our part in it, we need to live freely and fearlessly and maintain a humble and faithful connection with the traditions and wisdom of the wider Church.

Our identity as a community of Jesus’s followers is primarily expressed in love, gratitude and hospitality, not in compliance with a negative code of conduct.

The good news of the Kingdom always seems disreputable and dangerous and unwelcome, and it asks of us a whole new way of being God’s gracious people in a world of hatred and violence.

The Spirit is there for us where ever we gather in the one place for that one purpose.

The Lord’s Prayer is given to us, the Church, as a model to shape all our praying.

Christ calls us together into a spirit-filled body in the face of demonic forces that would seek to drive us apart and trick us into the fatal error of going it alone.

God invites us to say “yes” to the Spirit, to be open to seeing ourselves beyond the constraints others place on us and to be open to forming new community with God and with God’s world.