[00:00:01] Welcome to the River Church podcast. We're all about bringing the life, hope and love of Jesus to everyone around us. For more information, check out our
[email protected]. thank you for these prayers, Lord and God. We come in front of you again and just as a people called out, like Colin says, we're called out away from just Sundays, away from gatherings, to go and bring light and life and hope to everyone around us.
[00:00:28] So we kind of feel a little bit like I guess your people did thousands of years ago, standing on the edge of something, not quite knowing how it's going to happen, but knowing God is with us.
[00:00:39] So we say, father, do it.
[00:00:41] Would you do it? Father, would you do it? You have an abundance of resources. You are sovereign over all things, over hearts, minds, premises and paths, literally everything.
[00:00:53] So we say, lord, we long for this. We want to share our hearts with you. We long for this. We long to be a light into the community, a permanent presence where we get to reach out to anyone and everyone, where they get to discover who you really are.
[00:01:11] So we ask you, we ask you for provision.
[00:01:14] We also ask you for patience.
[00:01:18] We ask you to strengthen us whilst we wait.
[00:01:21] But above all things, would you provide in Jesus name your precious name, we pray.
[00:01:27] Amen.
[00:01:28] Amen.
[00:01:30] And it would be, yeah, please take your seat. And if you would, if you want to know a little bit more than that, then let's chat about it. Tap me on the shoulder, I'm gonna have a cup of tea after and probably a biscuit, I might treat myself. So come and find me and we'll talk about.
[00:01:48] But I'm preaching today as well, so sorry you have to put up with me a bit longer than that. Yay. So I'm excited, though.
[00:01:58] So we're going to be doing the next part of our series following Jesus together. And was it Mr. Travis who kicked us off last week? Here? Yeah. Good. Did he do a good job?
[00:02:10] Good. Any heretical preaching that I need to know about?
[00:02:13] No.
[00:02:14] Yeah, good, that's fine. Hey, I want to talk about people today.
[00:02:19] I want to talk about people. And I've noticed, and I don't know whether you have, how good we are at removing people from ordinary life.
[00:02:29] I don't mean bumping them off, don't worry. Removing people from ordinary life. Well, what do I mean? Okay, three examples for you.
[00:02:37] Supermarket self scanning.
[00:02:39] We love those things, don't we?
[00:02:42] We've basically agreed to become unpaid staff, haven't we? Because we scan our shopping, we pack our shopping, and then the machine has the audacity to accuse us of stealing coriander. Yeah. Do you know what I mean?
[00:02:55] Right, so it's not just supermarkets. Restaurants then got involved.
[00:02:59] So you approach a table, no one speaks to you other than this shouty QR code saying order now.
[00:03:07] So you order your food and it then magically turns up and you've spoken to no one. The only thing you've possibly had to do is an app update.
[00:03:15] This might be an introvert's heaven, but it's a bit worrying.
[00:03:20] But I don't think it is as worrying as this.
[00:03:25] There we go.
[00:03:27] Some hotels in China are now using robots for room service.
[00:03:33] You can look it up later, not now. But I promise you, these are robots and they move around.
[00:03:40] So on the ground floor the food goes in, right? So your burger goes in. Because it's always a burger with room service, right? So the burger goes in, the robot goes down the foyer, it gets itself into a lift, it goes up the lift to the right floor, comes down the corridor and even rings on your doorbell.
[00:04:00] And then all you have to do is take your dinner out of its tummy. Which, if you think about it, is really strange, isn't it?
[00:04:11] Isn't that nuts? Yeah, it's bonkers.
[00:04:15] I'm not anti technology. I used to work in digital. I like technology, I like convenience as much as the next person. But when you look at actually what's happening underneath all of this, you realize that we are becoming more disconnected and we like to call it progress.
[00:04:37] Yeah, it's weird, isn't it?
[00:04:39] Because if you correlate our technological growth with our kind of relational growth, you realize we're in poverty, right? We are in poverty because we are struggling now not just with physical illnesses, but mental, emotional and relational issues, whether it's loneliness, anxiety, depression, all sorts of things. And one of the places that I think, particularly in the west, we have seen that loss, the most arguably, is around the table.
[00:05:10] So it's kind of hinted at with robots, but for most of human history, the table having meals together, it wasn't just about consuming calories, it was about community.
[00:05:26] It was where the family gathered, it was where stories were told, it was where people were shaped by friendships, it was where wisdom was passed down through the generations.
[00:05:38] People were really known around the table.
[00:05:42] But now I think we've lost some of that, haven't we? You know, we all do it, but we eat on the sofas, sometimes on our phones, we eat in cars, and quite often we're alone unless the robot sticks around.
[00:05:59] But slowly what's happening is, without noticing it, our modern culture is discipling us away from Kingdom culture.
[00:06:08] Do you think that?
[00:06:10] Yeah, a little bit. Let me show you what I mean. I've got two lists here.
[00:06:14] There we go. Modern culture, Kingdom culture. And I think they're really different. I think they're opposed to one another. On one hand you've got modern culture, which is all about convenience. Right. What is easiest for me, well, it's robots, isn't it? We think.
[00:06:31] Whereas on the other end, it's completely different. It's about human commitment, no matter the personal cost. To me, you've then got efficiency. It was once summarized in a personality test of be brief, be bright, be gone. That's how I treat people, apparently. Right. But actually the other end is all about presence.
[00:06:55] It's about being there regardless.
[00:07:00] And then the classic independence, which leads to isolation versus interdependence, which means that you have to rely on other people, but guess what, they rely on you. That's Kingdom culture.
[00:07:12] Yeah. Consumption, participation.
[00:07:17] They're really different. One's me focused, that's us focused.
[00:07:21] But lastly, and I think this is the really interesting one is control.
[00:07:26] We've got any control freaks in the house?
[00:07:28] Yeah, I'm one.
[00:07:31] If we control everything, everything's going to be okay, right?
[00:07:36] No, no. Yet we think that. So we try and put this perimeter around ourselves and protect ourselves, our heart, our mind, our bodies, our health. We're actually. Kingdom culture says no, get vulnerable, because you can actually trust people.
[00:07:55] And when you really invite people in is when you're most known and when you most belong.
[00:08:01] So you've got these two competing cultures, and the truth is whichever one that you allow to influence you the most will impact how you treat people.
[00:08:12] That's the equation here.
[00:08:15] So the question behind the question is really, who are you? Therefore becoming Kingdom culture, which is Jesus culture, was never about ease, was it? It was about building life around relationships. And I tell you, in a world that is drifting into a bit more isolation every day, Jesus answer is still the same regardless of 2000 years in between. It is to build life around shared community.
[00:08:46] And that's what I want to talk about today. But if you weren't around last week and you didn't hear the tee up, there were some big ideas that I believe Mr. T shared. Right.
[00:08:57] This was the big one.
[00:08:58] Jesus circles. Jesus life happened in three relational circles. He had his 70, the biggest one, he had his guys, his 12, and he had the three.
[00:09:11] And each time you step further in towards the middle the relational depth increases. And I think we talked about right in the middle was just Jesus and the Father and the Spirit.
[00:09:21] Yeah.
[00:09:22] So we see this mapping onto river church life today. We see relational circles like this. We see that we've got the church, which is kind of like the gathering here. We've got community, and then we've got core.
[00:09:39] So the church one is the vital one. It's the one that everything happens within. And it is about worship and it is about preaching, and it is about what we've done by taking communion together as a family.
[00:09:51] Yet I think we also said last week that this gathering is a limited picture of what the church actually is.
[00:10:03] And I went into in Gravesend, Romans 12:5, and that's what I wanted to read really quickly to us. Now it says, so in Christ, we, though many, form one body, which is a familiar picture. And I think, Ian, you talked about it.
[00:10:21] But the bit I want to underline is the next bit, which is each member belongs to all the others.
[00:10:28] Not attends with, not occasionally interact with, but belongs.
[00:10:37] I honestly think that this is where the line is belonging to one another.
[00:10:44] You see, I don't mean that in terms of salvation. I mean that in terms of transformation as Christians, because I believe that you can absolutely attend church without really feeling like you belong here or with anyone.
[00:11:00] But unless you realize you belong, then I'm not sure you will ever follow Jesus as much as you could.
[00:11:09] Because left alone, what tends to happen is that we start making a lot of our own decisions. We end up with our own version, even of Christianity.
[00:11:21] We have our own preferences, our own blind spots.
[00:11:26] And I think in the end, we just struggle to grow in the things that Jesus cares about the most. Right. We're talking about humility and patience and other relational things like grace.
[00:11:38] We've received it. We need to pass it on. If there's no one to pass it on to, that's a problem.
[00:11:44] See, modern culture, it really is all about my life belonging to me.
[00:11:50] But I want us to get something today and we'll bring it to life in a minute. But it's the fact that in the church, your life doesn't really belong to you alone, which means your faith affects my faith and my faith affects your faith. Your presence affects me, and your absence affects me in the same way that mine would to you.
[00:12:14] And in the same way I say to everyone, you're a gift to the church. God has given you things that are there to strengthen the church. So if you pull back, we're weaker for it and if I choose to do the same, it would be the same back. We have been joined together by God, therefore we belong to one another. And that really is how God has designed us to follow Jesus together.
[00:12:37] If there was one line in this series, it wouldn't be follow Jesus, it would be together. That's the main emphasis that we want to draw out.
[00:12:46] But we have a challenge on our hands because as great as our gatherings are, it is really hard to be known in a crowd.
[00:12:56] It's really hard to belong, which is why we've got to step into the circles a bit more, go deeper, because then rows where we don't really interact on a Sunday much give way for relationships.
[00:13:14] And we see that in the life of Jesus. And as I say, you've got his 12 here, his 12. And they're the guys that Jesus hung out with, he looked after, he fed into, they ate together, had fun together, laughed together. And do you know what the danger is that we think that's the model then?
[00:13:34] The problem with that is that we would end up encouraging you all into single gender groups and to probably live with Ian. And if you'd like to do that, then speak to him afterwards. But that would be a weird model and almost totally unscalable.
[00:13:51] It wouldn't work for loads of reasons, which is why we've got to go a little bit bigger to understand what was happening with the 12.
[00:13:59] And when you flick through, even casually, the whole of the New Testament, there is one metaphor for the church that comes out again and again and again, which is family, but not necessarily in the way that we naturally think about family.
[00:14:15] Now I know that we've got, we've seen, I don't know, is like 28 nations or something up on that screen. It's a lot. So culturally we're already going to have different definitions of what family actually is. But I think if you grew up in the west in particular, this is probably your idea of family. Something a bit like this.
[00:14:33] We've got mum and dads, we've got some nice clean children, we've got a lovely house which is fenced in all the way round. And you absolutely know that there is a camera, doorbell just behind them to keep the riff raff out. Right, welcome to family.
[00:14:53] This is so far away from family 2,000 years ago in Greco Roman culture.
[00:15:01] So far away from it. And we need to understand what it was like back then.
[00:15:07] Because what happened is you didn't just live with your own kids, you lived with grandparents, aunts, aunties, you lived with cousins, close friends and even business partners. That wasn't uncommon, which probably breaks the mould of most of our cultures, at least at that point.
[00:15:26] Basically, people that weren't your blood became your family and you shared life together. That was it.
[00:15:34] And the early church, they looked at this model and they kind of adopted it. It was what they were used to in their surroundings. But they reshaped it radically around how Jesus defined family because he went even further.
[00:15:48] So we see this quite fun interaction after Jesus selects his 12. Literally a couple of pages later, we see in Mark that someone's coming up to Jesus.
[00:16:00] So the context is this.
[00:16:02] Jesus, mother and brothers have arrived and they're standing outside. They send someone in to call to him, Jesus, and a crowd is sitting around him.
[00:16:14] And he says to them, this person, your mother and brothers are outside looking for you. Jesus, who are my mother and brothers?
[00:16:24] He asked interesting question.
[00:16:29] He's looking around at the people in the circle. Interesting.
[00:16:34] That are around him. And he says, look, here are my mother and my brothers.
[00:16:39] Whoever does God's will is my brother and my sister and my mother.
[00:16:47] Have you ever found it a bit puzzling what he says here, almost a bit offensive towards those that are waiting outside for him? You know, it's your mum, Jesus, right? She's fairly well regarded in certain parts of the church in particular, isn't she?
[00:17:07] Is he bidding off the idea of blood being important?
[00:17:11] No, not really. He's just saying, look, I want to extend the idea. You get my mother and you get my brother, but I want to now say that all of you are just as important to me. He's extending the idea of something they knew to be so much bigger.
[00:17:30] And Paul grabs hold of this idea. He actually uses the same language about brothers, sisters and family 130 times across his letters alone, which is a massive proportion. So it's a really big theme, but I think there's a real hidden pocket of scripture where he talks about it more than any other. And most of the time we flick over it because we're almost at the end of the letter. It's Romans 16. None of you will know these verses off by heart. I'm not going to read them all out, but I'm just going to flash them up. Here you go.
[00:18:02] You see, at the end of the letter, most letters, it's not just a case of just signing it off. I've run out of paper and ink.
[00:18:12] Some of the most important themes are reiterated.
[00:18:15] And Paul's doing the same here. And what he does is he lists 26 different people by name, let alone other people he doesn't reference by name because he's trying to underline a point about family, about unity coming out of diversity.
[00:18:31] Right, so I'm just going to fly through these names. Don't try and keep up, it'll be impossible. But I want to just say we meet a whole bunch of people, right? The first one is Phoebe. She was a deacon in the church, but likely a businesswoman and she funded loads of the church's mission.
[00:18:47] So you got this quite influential woman. But then we hop over immediately. He greets Priscilla and Aquila. They were a married couple, they taught in the church, but even Paul says they risk their lives for me. Wow.
[00:19:02] We then meet Rufus and his mother, who Paul says, hey, do you know what? She's even been a mother to me as well.
[00:19:10] And then we meet dear friends, both Jews and Gentiles.
[00:19:14] We meet people like Gaius, who it says hospitality that I and the whole church have enjoyed.
[00:19:22] We meet big time officials. City director of public works would have been his job title, Erastus. But then in the same breath, from these big important people, you hear from what is likely a freed slave, Tertius at the bottom, who is then invited to write down the words Paul is saying.
[00:19:46] Isn't that amazing? Not Erastus, city director. I want you.
[00:19:52] We are the words of Paul came from a free slave. Wow, you've got this crazy collection of people here.
[00:20:03] Honestly, it's wild. They wouldn't know each other in normal life, but they came to see each other as brothers and sisters. They were all in not one church in Rome. We would often think that house churches, house churches. 20, 30 people gathering in the biggest homes. Likely all of these people in the main would have had someone connected to them in life, blood.
[00:20:29] But actually they understood how to grow in Christ the most. So they looked beyond that and said, right, I need fellow believers in my life.
[00:20:39] So they shared meals, homes, stories, prayer, mission, everyday life. They, in Christ, became family.
[00:20:49] And I want to say something really important about the context, the home.
[00:20:54] The home is where they gathered, not in a theater.
[00:20:59] They gathered in homes because they saw that the church was a home.
[00:21:05] It was radically countercultural.
[00:21:09] And I want to say that is what many of us really want because we had a survey done recently and the results of that survey confirmed this is what we want.
[00:21:19] So people answered questions, you guys answered questions about life beyond a Sunday. And something became really, really clear.
[00:21:27] You were saying things like, I want deeper connection, I want someone walking alongside me, I want to grow Spiritually, not just attend things, right? Amen. Who wants to attend stuff?
[00:21:41] And it sounded like connect groups, based on what you said, are helping a little bit.
[00:21:46] But one comment captured it brilliantly.
[00:21:49] They said, connect group is great for friendship, but it doesn't always go deep.
[00:21:56] And actually, we were pretty relieved that someone had said this because it was what we were probably seeing and feeling as leaders.
[00:22:05] The groups are pretty sociable, but they're not great for building family.
[00:22:11] You guys are after honesty. You said, vulnerability, transformation, real discipleship. And as we've looked at this and weighed it, you know, this type of formation doesn't happen when you're on your own. You need other people as you go. And often, well, it will happen round a table, laughing and sharing and praying and suffering together.
[00:22:38] So where are we at then?
[00:22:41] Where are we at? How far away from that are we?
[00:22:44] Well, we don't think the issue is hunger. We want it.
[00:22:50] But can we create the right rhythms in our lives for community to grow? That feels like the thing.
[00:22:57] So from September, we've been considering this, thinking we probably want to change our emphasis a bit.
[00:23:03] And I want to kill anything on the rumor mill about us splitting up these gatherings and becoming lots of home churches. That's not the vision. This will still happen, but we want to shift our emphasis so that we can express more and more about what the church actually is, which is a family.
[00:23:21] So we want to just mix groups up a bit and kind of become community groups.
[00:23:27] That's probably what the name's going to be. And the idea is that these are smaller circles within the big church circle where people can actually truly belong.
[00:23:38] But it starts with one of those key ingredients, which is commitment to one another.
[00:23:45] Not just I will attempt to attend, but commitment. I will be there for you like I expect you to be there for me.
[00:23:55] We feel like there is an opportunity to open up our lives a bit more, to eat round a table together, to walk in rhythms spiritually. Practices that have more intentionality about them. You know, I don't know if you found yourself struggling on a Bible plan or trying to pray for something every day, but when you know other people, for example of fasting, we do a week of fasting.
[00:24:18] Wow. It changes how you live.
[00:24:23] So these groups, we would love to run them longer than just a term.
[00:24:27] Resetting them has had certain benefits, but I think we have lost depth of relationship, which comes over time, and it feels like now's a good chance to change them.
[00:24:41] But as I say, this is not a rehash of groups. It isn't. This isn't a. Guys, it's another thing to squeeze into your already busy lives. We're saying we think something's missing from a lot of our lives because there should be something. Looking at this collection of people, particularly in Romans 16, that was refreshing for them, replenishing for them, which meant that they could cope with their busy lives.
[00:25:08] Why should it be any different now?
[00:25:14] We're also thinking carefully how we can help.
[00:25:20] We've probably reflected how much we've supported leaders over the years, and we think we could do even more to help group facilitators out. So we want to train people, and over the summer, that's what we'll be doing. But I want to just, again, just kill another myth here.
[00:25:37] Who's ever led a group of any type in any church, ever? Put your hand up. Okay, so there's a chunk, but it's not everyone, because a lot of people either wait for an invitation or think they're excluded because they're not good enough.
[00:25:52] Yeah. Who doesn't feel they're good enough? Don't have to. Put your hand up.
[00:25:56] Yeah. Graham. No, no.
[00:26:00] You don't have to be good enough. You just have to care enough.
[00:26:04] Like community is a shared commitment. It's simply saying, you're my family and I belong to you and you belong to me. And we just need people that are going to awe the wheels of that and set the tone culturally and even host bit maybe, but those invitations will come. But I want to say, if God's nudging you, say, yeah, and go for it.
[00:26:26] One of the best decisions that you could make.
[00:26:29] But we don't want to only focus on the positive, though. Right. We're aware that there are a couple of challenges, and I'll just finish with these.
[00:26:38] Because community, well, it's messy.
[00:26:45] That's because you're messy. And I'm definitely messy.
[00:26:49] All right? I've got problems.
[00:26:53] And at some time, we know what groups are like. If you've ever been in a group, someone talks too much, don't they?
[00:27:00] Or somebody says something you don't quite agree with, or somebody says the wrong thing or forgets to say the right thing. And somehow that annoys us so much that modern culture within our DNA kicks in and says, right, I'm out.
[00:27:14] Because I'm now no longer getting the benefit that I want from this group that ignores something pretty big.
[00:27:24] It says I'm going to grow in things more on my own than through these uncomfortable, difficult moments, which actually isn't true.
[00:27:33] I haven't got time to go into it, but just look at the life of Peter. Where does he grow the most when Peter is being built up or actually corrected by Jesus?
[00:27:42] Tough conversations give us growth more than anything else does.
[00:27:46] We should embrace them.
[00:27:49] But they're hard.
[00:27:50] But they give us life and they actually forge depth. And depth gives meaning and meaning gives belonging.
[00:27:59] So community is messy, but we should run towards it.
[00:28:04] Secondly, real life will 100% get in the way. You guys said it. So what's the biggest reason why you don't go to a connect group? Oh, I am stacked was the main message. I've got kids coming out of my ears, emails galore. I am so super busy. There is no way that I could possibly get anything else in my life done.
[00:28:28] I'm not going to do hands again. Every person in this room is super busy because that's modern life, right? We're busy people and we get it. It is easy on a cold dark night to choose Uber Eats and Netflix over coming out to be with messy people, right? It is. It's so much easier. But I think the thing that we want to get at is, is it it worth wise?
[00:28:53] Is it the best for you?
[00:28:57] Is it the best for the person sitting next to you to pull back?
[00:29:02] And actually, is it kingdom culture or is it not kingdom culture?
[00:29:10] Because actually that's what we need to look at if we are serious about following Jesus. We have to do it together because that is how we grow the most. That's how Jesus designed it.
[00:29:23] But here's reality check number three.
[00:29:27] It will cost us far more not to live this way because it costs us spiritually not to be connected with other believers because we belong to each other and we've been joined together. It means that I will, and I've proven it in my life, make more terrible decisions the further back I step from church life than if I step forward and actually hear the wisdom of others and let them speak into my life. You know, I will struggle to be formed into the likeness of Jesus, the one who I actually apparently want to be like. The more I step further away from other people that are trying to be like him.
[00:30:06] We need each other to grow like Jesus.
[00:30:14] I reckon the best groups I've ever been involved with, they're the ones that manage this shared life. They get beyond chitchat and finishing the eight week video program. They're good, but is that family?
[00:30:29] You know, the best groups I've been in are the ones when you ask for prayer. They already know why the Best groups I've been in are the ones that don't post prayer hand emojis.
[00:30:42] They're the ones that come over to lay hands on you to pray.
[00:30:47] And you know what? The last, like, month has been pretty brutal for me. My sister, I think a lot of, you know, not Cress. Let me be really clear. I've got another sister, Zoe, but she had cancer for two and a half years, but passed away about a month ago.
[00:31:05] Honestly, I've got my blood family. They have been great.
[00:31:10] We've gone through something unique together, but actually, in the moment of suffering, we're all suffering.
[00:31:17] So to have a church family who are checking in, texting, loving, giving compassion, giving space when it's needed, and being there on my doorstep when I've needed it has been amazing.
[00:31:34] That is what we're talking about.
[00:31:36] If people don't even know you've got a sister, are you doing life with them?
[00:31:43] I had so many messages because people have been on the journey. You guys have prayed.
[00:31:49] I know you have. It's been stunning. And really, that's what we're talking about, doing life in community, getting known by people, going through bad stuff when other people can carry you, when you just can't stand up yourself.
[00:32:04] But it will grow us.
[00:32:06] Maybe the bank will come back up. Is that all right?
[00:32:12] Jesus loved his community.
[00:32:15] He loved them. Paul loved his community. He was excited about seeing them. And the great news is, I honestly believe we can find community we love here. And it is happening already in River Church, we are pleased to say. So many people filled in the survey saying, I am connected to others. They do know me, they do know my story.
[00:32:38] I do feel like family.
[00:32:42] And the thing is, we want to extend that away from pockets, doing it organically to this being our culture, River Church, family culture. Not an optional extra that I sign up to.
[00:32:57] I would love. I would ban any announcement that says, please sign up to a group because it's the wrong language.
[00:33:08] I think we should delete it. So any person with a microphone, please never say that.
[00:33:13] Come and be part of my family.
[00:33:15] That's the invitation. Come around the table, come over for dinner. Let's hang out.
[00:33:20] I want to find out about you. I want to tell you about me. I want to walk together, highs and lows, you name it. We're there for one another. And it's because we want to go beyond this. This is great, but wow. It's not about attendance at all. It never was. It's about so much more than that. It's actually about not missing the gift that Jesus has given to the church, which isn't just himself, it's finding him through other people as well.
[00:33:49] I feel like we should stand and pray together.
[00:33:54] Yeah. As we're standing, I want to encourage you, right. We don't have to decide any of this stuff now, but we want to make the invitation really compelling, really strong. We love you. The people around you love you. And we want to do life together. We want to do life as a family. We're a family on mission.
[00:34:13] So don't waste time between now and September, right?
[00:34:18] Summer's here. Open up your home, your life. Go to the pub, hang out, play games, have fun. It's what's supposed to happen.
[00:34:26] And then get into some meaningful conversations. Some of the best times I have, you play a game, like game of tennis, and then you go for a drink and you talk about real life.
[00:34:35] We're talking about extending some of that.
[00:34:37] And as we do, I'm absolutely convinced because Jesus is holding us all together.
[00:34:43] He is going to be deepening relationships before we even get to September.
[00:34:47] Let's pray.
[00:34:49] Let's pray.
[00:34:51] Yeah. Jesus, we are seeking you for your vision, for your church.
[00:34:58] And I want to pray that it gets put on our hearts way better than I've even been able to describe it today, that you put a longing in our hearts for it. That no matter how we feel or what we've experienced of community and family, that you do the necessary healing, you do the necessary help for us to prioritize what you're about and what you're calling us to. And we pray that we truly would be a church that is known by the way we love one another.
[00:35:34] I want to pray for anyone here who's standing on the fringes of it going. I'm not sure I want to say, are you sure, Jesus? You invite us to the best thing to know you, and then we step into that relationship and realize, hang on a minute, I've got a whole bunch of other relationships I didn't even know about. We pray the reality of that becomes our culture here, family.
[00:36:05] We pray that over us we receive that. Jesus, we ask you to deepen relationships and friendships and would this be a fruitful place where many, many come to belong amongst us because of it.
