Summary of Moving from connected to community
Preamble
Brent starts by giving a recap of the 2015 Fall Carnival. Over 750 people to 800 people attended the event. There were 175 volunteers. A great way to get connected, if you are new to southridge, is volunteering at one of our major events like Fall Carnival for soccer camp.
Sunday morning can’t cultivate community
Brent goes on to discuss Sunday morning connection. This is once a week and not enough to make deep meaningful relationships.It will never be deep enough. Creating a real sense of community cannot simply be a 2 minute conversation on Sunday. Neither can an online friendship. Facebook posting and tagging cannot create deep community.
Philippians 2 verse 1 & 2
If you’ve gotten anything at all out of following Christ, if his love has made any difference in your life, if being in a community of the Spirit means anything to you, if you have a heart, if you care— then do me a favor: Agree with each other, love each other, be deep-spirited friends.
Brent goes on to discuss a summary of all the Old Testament rules. He then points out that Jesus summarizes all of these rules into two simple rules: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.
Love your neighbor as yourself
Loving your neighbor as yourself involves developing relationships and building community. This style of loving isn’t something we were born knowing how to do. This type of love is something we need to practice and get better at. But we have Christ as our model.
The importance of Community
Brent discusses the importance of being apart of a community. He also points out great benefits of community: accountability to others, and the support of others. Brent brings up the book “Chasing the Scream”. In this book the author discusses the fight against drugs and drug addictions over the last 100 years. Brent focuses on an interesting chapter were the author discusses how community increases the chances of a person with an addiction can overcome the addiction. If the person is a loner the changes of defeating the addiction is extremely low.
The Rat Commercial from the 1980s
Kennedy’s Blog
As an example of how we can build community Brent uses the writings of his eldest daughter Kennedy. She has recently moved away to a new city for post secondary education. She needs to start creating friendships and integrating into a new community — and doing it all alone and from scratch. Brent uses her blog posts as a touching example of how a church can “love your neighbour as yourself.”
About this Message Series
This is a message in the message series This is who we are. You belong here. The goal of this series is to discuss and explain SouthRidge’s mission statement — Love God, change the World, one life at time — and introduce the new 2020 vision statement. This series was started in September 2015.
About the Speaker
Brent is the lead pastor here at SouthRidge. He and his wife Pam were part of the original church plant.