A few weeks ago Jeff & I had coffee with a gentleman who found SFC online. It was a little trippy to talk to someone who knew all about us from our blog posts, Facebook, and our website, yet who we had never met. He asked lots of really great questions. Once again Jeff and I found ourselves trying to articulate what we understand church to be.
One of the beautiful things about our community is that it is shaped by each new person who comes. This means that while we have no plans to ever own a building or have traditional Sunday morning worship we actually don’t know what our community will look like in the future because we don’t know who God is sending to us. Our community is continually being crossed pollinated with the callings and ministries of each person. I may have a certain God given call and vision yet it blends with the God given calls and visions of our community.
This is even more complex because I firmly believe that there are lots of different ways to be church. There are many traditional churches in our area that are just killing it on Sunday mornings. For people who are looking for sermons, Sunday school, great music, and much more there are places that excel in these areas. Who we are interested in at SFC are people who have a different spiritual type or learn in different ways or maybe aren’t accustomed to the culture of the church. We are trying to create church for people who don’t go to church and maybe never have.
Our goal also is different. One of the questions we were asked is about how we get people to commit to Christ. I responded that our goal is to love people where they are and to help those who are part of our community grow spiritually. At the end of the day what matters for us is not that people believe in a certain thing or give a certain amount of money or become members of a specific organization. What matters is that people are further along on their spiritual journeys after having spent time with us.
I’ve been dreaming of this community and preparing for it for so long that I forget that what we’re doing is a little weird for folks who have never really thought about church in a different way. It’s such a great discipline to have a chance for us to really think about who we are when we have these conversations with people. I hope our new friend finds what he is looking for and I really hope it’s with us, but I know that sometimes our job is to spark an idea for someone that leads them forward into another community.
It’s such a gift when anyone’s path crosses ours and it’s amazing how conversations and encounters with our community cause us to evolve in the most beautiful of ways. God is at work in the most mundane and mysterious of ways here. Hallelujah!
-Eilidh
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| Great moments happen over a cup of coffee. |
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