New Hope Community OR "I was changed"

Since the last week of December I have been preaching on Sundays (and a couple Saturdays) at New Hope Community in Boardman/Youngstown. Their pastor left in November and Dr. Downs asked me to help bridge the gap and preach for at least month. At first I said no, feeling a little overwhelmed with the other demands in life lately. After Kelly and I spoke about it a little more and committed some prayer to it we decided to call back and say yes.

It has been a blessing.

I love this community of "everyday life missionaries" living out their faith in Northeast Ohio. My second week preaching there they voted on a new pastoral family and confirmed their call to Adam and Jackie Stevens. When I said yes I knew that they were considering Adam and Jackie and this made it ever more appealing to me. I learned so much about preparing the way for a new pastor through this experience. Every week I felt like God opened my eyes to the next thing to share.

I started by preaching on Christian Community (go figure), specifically about how God CALLS US into Christian community. Throughout Scripture this is the case. It is at the initiation of God and the response of us. Paul Hanson speaks about this a lot in his book "The People Called".

I also touched on how it is a GIFT from God, and not something that is guaranteed. Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke about this a lot in Life Together, as he reflected on his experiences in Christian Community after it was stripped away as he was isolated in prison.

The next few weeks we journeyed through Ephesians 4:1-16 and unpacked what it takes to live in Christian Community. We really focused on Ephesians 4:2, which the Lord has been bringing to my mind every time I am about to go off on someone lately... it's been very helpful. "Be completely humble and gentle, be patient, bearing with one another in love." Those words seem so simple and trite, but when you really dwell on them and apply them to the way we treat one another it is easy to see how the practice of that verse can lead to very healthy Christian Community. This verse has changed me and I hope it continues to.

I continued on through that passage over the next couple of weeks and discussed our need to celebrate what we have in common and to fulfill the functions/roles we are gifted and called to do within the body of believers. The last message from that passage discussed the results of the first 11 verses and what a united, fully functioning, celebratory community of believer would look like to those around them.

Two weeks about I went back and spoke about practical ways to develop Christian Community (like my favorite of eating with one another) and loving one another. Finally, this week I preached about loving our neighbors in the way of the Good Samaritan.

For some reason I can't really summarize how amazing this experience was for me personally and for that church body and I together. I'm not satisfied with this attempt to describe it's impact on myself or them. This is a good summary of what I was led to share, but hopefully I can express the impact of this time more adequately in another post.

Instead I will summarize my feelings about this experience with some simple words of Jayber Crow, "I was changed".