To Save a Life: Week 6 Thoughts

Stepping Into the Bigger Story

This will be our final week in the To Save a Life series. I will write another post on my thoughts on the series as a whole. I want to make sure to keep the focus on the lesson this week and not get distracted by my reflections on the last 6 weeks.

We will be discussing community this week. Our main focus will be Acts 2, or what I always think of as the golden era of Christianity. This was a time when people were working together for a common purpose. The Holy Spirit was guiding the community. People were getting saved. A strong sense of community was built. Life was exciting. They were on an adventure. But, somewhere along the line, the excitement went away.

I think we see glimpses of that feeling of adventure in the church today. Someone gets an idea to start a new small group, or community group, and they drum up some excitement in a circle of friends. A few outsiders join the group and they go out and do their thing for a few weeks or months. It seems great, much like the group of students that’s involved with this series. A family unit is formed and things are exciting. And then something happens. Life gets in the way. Family, jobs, and responsibilities take over and the group dwindles or changes in a way that the original group sees and thinks, “man, this sure was a lot better when…” and before you know it the group is done and gone. On to the next new thing. I suppose that these flash in the pan groups serve a purpose. After all, God uses all things for good and if one person chose to follow God, or felt God’s love as a result of that group, then it was a success.

But what happened to the church? We are all supposed to be one body working towards one goal. We are supposed to be breaking bread together and helping each other stay the course. We are supposed to be adding to our numbers daily. But I don’t see that happening.
The first person I blame is me. I’m not doing enough. I’m not saying enough. I’m not creating the very thing I am looking for. I get caught up in my own issues. I look back and say, “man, things were a lot better when….”

I’m rambling here, I know. But, I am trying to work through a thought on community. How do we come together as one body when we can’t even agree on what the Bible means? We get caught up in semantics. We argue about which translation of the bible is the best. We spend hours discussing what Jesus may have meant. And in all our disagreements we are divided.

The world doesn’t look at us and see the body of Christ. They see a house divided, and crumbling. They see Catholics, Protestant, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and so on. They see denomination, not community. What happened to our common goal? How are we supposed to create community when most of us don’t even want to live in the same neighborhood? The world can just sit back and watch us fade away.

I don’t have the answers. But I think we can all agree (oh, I know…we can’t) that if we are to have a true revival; if we are to stop ourselves from fading away and save the truth, then we have to come together and remember what it was we were commanded to do – to be His witnesses, to tell people about Him everywhere.

So this week we are going to talk about how the students can come together in their schools. We will discuss ideas for bringing people together and creating something that might last long after they are graduated and gone…a grandiose idea, for sure, but if we don’t dream big then we don’t give God the opportunity to do big things.