Tuesday, January 15, 2008

The Church

A new sermon series started at Downtown on Sunday. The top of our small group discussion guide said this: "When we gave our lives to Jesus, God did something besides save us; he also placed us in a group of people with whom we have this shared experience of salvation. We call that group the church. Over the next several weeks we will be taking a closer look at the church; at what we are as well as what we should be. We do so with a desire to truly be the people God intends us to be." I am really looking forward to this new series and hate that I am going to miss at least one Sunday. I'd like to know what your answers are to the questions below. I'm going to share mine as a comment.

  1. When you hear the word "church," what are some of the first things that come to mind?
  2. What do you think might come to the minds of those who are not part of a church?
  3. Share a time in your life when the church was wonderfully supportive; when the church helped you through a crisis, guided you, or in some other way loved you in a way that made a difference in your life.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

1. I think of assembly, God's people, family, support, worship (I definitely haven't always thought of those words though!)
2. Boring, hypocritical, judgmental
3. One memory that I will always have about my experiences with the church was when I went on Wilderness Trek as a teen. My friend Ainsley and I were really having a hard time and our buddies Chris and Justin would hang back and encourage us. They would even lift our packs off our backs some to take the weight off! One of the more recent times I've felt the support of the church was when Shelby was born and in NICU. Our church family gave us money, food, a baby shower, came to see us in Little Rock, came to pray with us, and just showered us with care and concern during those scary two weeks. Since our family weren't in town, I have no idea how we would have made it without the Lord and His people in Searcy!

Traci said...

1. worship, family, love, saved
2. boring, fake, waste of time
3. Thankfully, we haven't been through any huge crisis in life, but I truly feel that the church that we are blessed to be a part of would be there for us in any way that we ever needed.

This sounds like a great series!

Anonymous said...

1. family, support, LOVE, imperfect humans who know grace and mercy, and "all the Christian people" - from a toddlers class I taught.

2. ignorant, hypocritical, irrelevant, profiteering, boring

3. When Travis and I were first married, we had like $5.00 to get us until I got my first paycheck two weeks later. We never told a single person about our money woes, and for some strange reason we weren't even worried about it - I think we thought we could actually live on that! Anyway, the night we were figuring out what to spend our few dollars on, a couple from church knocked on our door with a huge box of groceries, and were apologizing that it had taken them a month after we moved there to finally give us our "pounding." There was a pound of hamburger meat, chicken, sugar, flour, rice, etc. inside, plus a gift certificate to Kroger for $25.00!!! We felt like the richest people on earth. God used His people to help us when we didn't have sense enough to get help ourselves! Also, our spiritual family surely did come through for us when our Mason was in the NICU, too.