Today was a good mesh of closing up Jesus and his relationship with the church and a new opener to finding out about the “Early Church”. To wrap up what we learned about Jesus and the church, we met in our small groups, which I always enjoy. We discussed Jesus’ relationship to the church in the following ways:
Nature of the Church
Liturgy and Sacrements
Community and Service
Mission/Witness
Organization/Leadership
My group landed for the most part on the ideas of Community and Service. In Jesus’ day, you worshipped and worked all within one community. But we talked about how the general church today is more “commuter-based” meaning we are living, worshipping, and working all in a different community. So how do we deal with this problem? We are called to be of service to our communities, wherever we are. But what happens when we are a part of 3 different communities? We talked a lot about how the advancements of technology have actually done a lot to HARM the Christian life….which is true. We are constantly in this struggle between living in our culture, which is SO tech focused, to being called in the Bible to live a simple life. How do we reason these issues?