A friend and I are leading a group at church called Gathering – the point is to gather together and just share how life is going, spend some time in worship and prayer, but most of all encourage one another by sharing how we have seen God moving in our lives. For the last few weeks we have also taken turns preparing a devo to get people’s brains going, but then our gathering was turning into more of a Bible study than time of sharing. Isn’t it funny how easy it is to slip into a default mode or go on auto-pilot: “we’re meeting in a church, so we should talk about the Bible!” Not that scripture isn’t foundational to our lives as Christians, but I don’t think an in-depth study is necessary to validate every time we get together.
Well, with that said, I was responsible for planning the devo last week and wanted to look at the text where Jesus says, “Where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”
That passage is Matthew 18, and the specific verse (20) comes after instructions for resolving conflicts between Christians. Awkward, since I was just looking for feel-good general niceness so we could talk about how great it is to gather in Jesus name. Instead I was stuck with taking the verse out of context (boo) or leading a study on conflict resolution. Continue reading “Thoughts on Community”