This week we’re exploring how to become a church community united by common learning goals, even when we are busy!
We’ve seen that the church is made up of many different complementary gifts and passions, but all put to use pursuing the same goal. The Bible described this as “maturity, the full stature of Christ”. The learning goal is learning and emulating Jesus’ character in everything life throws our way.
How?
Well, most topics are learned through a mixture of learning styles, like a textbook, lectures, discussion and homework, and experience.
These are many different learning styles, but the same content is meant to be communicated through them all.
Textbook: We’re going to start to read Bible together. We study it in in our challenges, but only a little snippet at a time. Now we’re going to start reading longer portions in sync together.
Lectures: These challenges are obviously one form of teaching, and our live Christianity 101 course that just concluded in Whitby. Take advantage of whatever future learning opportunities you can!
Discussion: This is critical, so I encourage you almost every day to start a discussion group based on our challenges. Have you? This means you’ll be getting encouraged and challenged by those you know, and can see and learn from others trying to follow Jesus. Make sure to contact Ryan with the good news, and to enjoy some leadership coaching and encouragement.
Lab Experience: Every Thursday we give a challenge, and although they are easy to ignore, this learning process depends on you actually trying to live out Jesus’ teachings in your life, where they will transform you!
In our case, Jesus’ character, lifestyle, spiritual maturity that comes from God alone, is learned through many forms.
Challenge: Start with the textbook learning. We are going to start to read the Bible in sync as a community every day. We will add a Bible reading plan to our web site and app, where you’ll find a daily Bible reading starting next Monday!
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I recently read Chris Hadfield’s book – An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth. Most of us know Hadfield the astronaut – and assume that being an astronaut involves a lot of adrenaline, courage, all focused on the time from takeoff to landing.
But in his book, he tries to broaden our view of astronauts, so we don’t just focus on those few days in space. HE talks about a number of the practices that he’s used in his lifetime…all in preparation for going to space, and debriefing afterwards.
For example, he says he sweats the small stuff, always thinking about the details of how he’d react to an emergency before it happens. He touts the power of negative thinking – he would always spend hours going over his failures with others, to ensure they didn’t happen again.
He studied like crazy - his kids made fun of him for having more homework, and taking it more seriously than they did! All this, in addition to the need for physical fitness and wellbeing with constant trips to the doctor, trying to avoid illness and injury.
It wasn’t glamorous or easy, his life sounds like it’s been so single-mindedly focused on making it to space that it was very boring in many other ways, thanks in part to these practices.
Those kids of practices are what prepared him for his mission going to the space station, so when things went wrong, he was prepared.
This kind of thinking is valuable not just for space travel. Any big challenge needs preparation, and if the challenge is big enough, we need to learn new routines, rituals and practices well in advance, to change who we are in sustainable ways, focusing ourselves on being ready for the task ahead.
That’s why we’re exploring the book of Acts right now to understand the first followers of Jesus as pioneers, and figure out how they organized themselves as a church community. That was a big mission, and they needed some practices as well, to help prepare them for the challenges ahead.
Question: What kind of practices do you think would be essential to being a follower of Jesus?
