Temple Courts and House-to-House: Embracing Authentic Community

They got a noticeably public rallying point. They have an underground person to person network. They have a platform for for church leadership, and they have a playground for everyone's gift to shine. They express themselves in formal songs and readings that someone took time to prepare, then they express themselves in this organic telling of stories and the asking of questions. We don't know where this goes till we get there. They had time for worship services. They had time for missional communities. [00:33:23] (29 seconds)  #PublicAndMissional

The only time, number two, we consistently find this happening, people dropping dead, is when they're standing on sacred space. In second second Samuel chapter six, when David treated the ark of God, this this holy place of God's presence like it was ox cart cart cargo, someone dropped dead that day. In Leviticus 10, when Aaron's sons infringed on the holiness of the tabernacle, they died on the spot that day. [00:47:23] (31 seconds)  #RespectSacredSpace

Because there's a couple regrets that sometimes I I I feel like they're affecting my my present as much as they affected my my past. That's that's hard stuff to work out on a Sunday morning. That's hard to do in the temple courts in the big church. That's why we set up missional communities. That's why we encourage you to love your neighbor as yourself. That's why we wanna see these family conversate all these family central gatherings that kinda, like, teach you how to go back home and have a good conversation [00:53:53] (31 seconds)  #MissionalCommunitiesHeal

I I mean, this if you go back and look at verse four again, Peter says, hey. The field was yours to begin with. What what you do with the sale of the property is up to you. In other words, you you could have kept the sale of the land. You could have kept a 100% for yourself. That would have been your choice. [00:49:08] (19 seconds)  #YourChoiceGiveLand

What is normal in the story of God is God's patience and God's kindness abounds. You go through the old testament, you see generation, generation, generation, generation of rebellious fools just shaking their fist at God, but God is giving them time to repent. God lets bad kings live live long lives. Evil empires like Babylon, they get to rise to the top before he eventually brings them down. [00:46:23] (26 seconds)  #GodsPatience

It's like, out of friendship to you, out of not wanting to say no. They might come, but 60% of people would rather the church come to them house to house. Real conversations. I love how Aaron's story was, like, driving at, like, I want something important to talk about besides just the weather. Would you all wanna talk about Jesus? Could we open up the scriptures together? [00:42:54] (25 seconds)  #InviteRealConversations

People learn to invest in each other more throughout that time, and I think that's actually going to grow more as AI, like, starts doing our jobs for us. Like, what what do we need people for? We need people for each other. And I think the importance of a good conversation with a listening ear and a thoughtful response, that that's going to continue to escalate and become even more important. [00:41:47] (24 seconds)  #PeopleForEachOther

Two rallying points to what the church was. There's there's no right answer between the two, but I want to make sure we have a both answer to what we understand church to be and how we apply our side selves as disciples following Jesus who does so in a community of others. Because the story of acts is like, when Jesus gets in one person's heart and the next person's heart and the next person's heart, he pushes them all together. [00:34:07] (28 seconds)  #HeartsPushedTogether