Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] You're listening to a live recording from Westside Church in Bend, Oregon. Thanks for joining us.
[00:00:06] Hello everyone.
[00:00:08] It's so good to see you all today.
[00:00:11] My name is Lindsay Parnell and I am the worship and spiritual formation pastor here at Westside. And it is my honor, my privilege to be sharing with you this morning as we continue our good and beautiful series. I get the privilege of speaking to you today about community and how pivotal it is for our faith and for our formation.
[00:00:35] All the extroverts said amen and all the introverts. Chest just got a little tighter.
[00:00:41] We're a little worried about what she's going to say up there.
[00:00:45] As I was thinking about my own formation, my journey with Jesus over the past 30 some odd years, lots of memories come to mind. A handful of are independent, solitary experiences that were really just between me and Jesus. One of those is when I first said yes to following him. I was about five years old, give or take, I don't know, I was 5ish and my mom signed me up to participate in something called Backyard Bible Club. Only the cool kids would know about Backyard Bible Club.
[00:01:22] Ms. Sue Peterson was the leader and she asked all the kids if anyone wanted to invite Jesus into their heart. And I enthusiastically said yes, I do. I want Jesus in my heart. I said yes to following him that day and for the next several weeks I would not shut up about it. I told anyone that would listen, Jesus lives in my heart now and everything is different. That was formational. That was a huge moment. Maybe some of you in the room are thinking of the moment when you first said yes to following Jesus.
[00:01:57] But as I look over, you know, the past years, I really only have a handful of experiences that really formed me when it was just me and God.
[00:02:08] Sometimes, yes, reading scripture, jumping off the page or I feel like I'm hearing the Lord's voice so strongly in prayer. There's a handful of those times, absolutely. But most of my memories, most of the things that formed me as I have followed Jesus and have involved other people, the community around me.
[00:02:29] I think of Ms. Sue Peterson, never forget.
[00:02:33] I think of Chewy and Lorraine. Yes, his name was Chewy and he was a kid's volunteer who made learning about Jesus so, so fun.
[00:02:46] I think about my youth pastors, Dave and Robin Angier, who would throw me up on the stage and have me lead worship, ready or not.
[00:02:54] And I think about, and these are just a few people. I've got way more people that come to mind. But I think about a group of Interns that I walked with for two years here in this very building.
[00:03:04] A group of 20 somethings who said yes to going deeper with Jesus and pouring ourselves out here in this place, learning all about ministry and the way and the life of Jesus. We were a diverse bunch of people from lots of different walks of life and we were all thrown together in one room for two years.
[00:03:24] They encouraged me, they loved me, they made me laugh, they bugged me, they shaped me and formed me. All of these people who have contributed to my relationship with Christ have shaped how I see or don't see Him. And maybe as you reflect on your path with Jesus, people are coming to mind for you as well.
[00:03:46] I propose to you today that our faith is not a solitary, individual, isolated experience, but that it is one that was always meant to be formed in community because we ourselves are actually created and designed for community. And I'm going to prove it to you.
[00:04:08] We were made for community because we were made in the image of God.
[00:04:14] Genesis chapter one, verse 26. On the very first page of our Bible it says, then God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness. He's speaking plurally about himself because we serve a trinitarian God, Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I can forget this oftentimes. I relate to God the Father, I relate to Jesus the Son, I relate to the Holy Spirit. But really they are three in one.
[00:04:51] Baxter Kruger, the author of one of my favorite books, the Great Dance, writes, before creation, before anything else existed, there was relationship, fellowship, camaraderie and togetherness.
[00:05:06] There was love and laughter and joy. The Great Dance, the of the Trinity before God said, let there be light. There was fellowship and camaraderie. Relationship existed between the members of the Trinity. The Greek word often used to describe this is perichoresis. And the best way to translate that is dance.
[00:05:30] The Father, Son and Holy Spirit, their mutuality and interaction constantly together. And we humankind have been made in this image.
[00:05:42] We are created to live in the same way. A dance, constant mutuality with the Blessed Trinity and with each other.
[00:05:52] We can look at Paul's letters to the early church as well. Yes, he speaks to some individuals. We don't really know what was going on with Gaius and with Tertius, but we do know that he was writing to a group of people every time he put pen to paper. That was the baseline assumption for Paul, was that this group of new believers trying to figure this thing out are doing it together. That's why there were so many letters, because they were Having such a hard time figuring it out. It was turbulent, it was bumpy. So he's writing again and again to these communities of people who are learning to live out their faith together. That was the baseline assumption.
[00:06:33] If we look at one of these letters to the Christians at Corinth, First Corinthians, chapter 12.
[00:06:39] Starting in verse 12, Paul writes, the human body has many parts, but the many parts make up one whole body. So it is with the body of Christ.
[00:06:50] Some of us are Jews, some are Gentiles, some are slaves, and some are free. But we have all been baptized into one body by one spirit, and we all share the Same Spirit. Verse 19. How strange a body would be if it had only one part.
[00:07:08] Yes, there are many parts, but only one body. The eye can never say to the hand, I don't need you. The head can't say to the feet, I don't need you.
[00:07:19] Paul is saying, yep, we're all individuals, we're all body parts. It's kind of weird, but we make up one body.
[00:07:28] And no one who is a part of this body gets to say to anyone else, I don't need you.
[00:07:35] That's a big deal. And I find within myself resistance to that idea. I don't know what it is about me, you guys. I don't like the idea of needing someone else. Maybe I listened to way too much Destiny's Child growing up. But all you women who independent throw your hands up at me.
[00:07:55] That was like, yes, I am an independent woman, says 13 year old Lindsey. And I don't need nobody. It's just ingrained in me. And maybe it is for you too. Needing help, relying on somebody else, that can be tricky for us.
[00:08:10] This plays out in some really silly ways in my life and one of them is in the grocery store.
[00:08:16] I will walk around for 10 minutes before I will stop and ask someone where this ingredient is. You guys like, no, absolutely not. I will wander and wander and then if enough time has passed, I will surrender to defeat and find a sweet person who works there and who knows where it is and could have shown me all along.
[00:08:35] It also translates into my driving for some reason. God bless Google Maps.
[00:08:40] Because I will not stop and ask for directions without my smartphone. I just drive round and round until I found where I was going. Hopefully I'd get there eventually. I don't know why I am the way that I am. Maybe it is pride, maybe it is vanity, maybe it's Destiny's Child. But I have a hard time and asking for help or even embracing the idea that I need someone else.
[00:09:01] When I was 18 or 19, me and two of my close friends decided we were going to road trip from Bend, Oregon to Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is where I'm from originally. And much of my family is still there.
[00:09:13] And so we hop in my tiny two door Hyundai Accent hatchback 2004 silver. It was great, but it was tight.
[00:09:22] We get in there and we start driving the 24 hours from Bend to Albuquerque and we take shifts, you know, taking turns driving, all doing our share. And it gets to be my turn, so I take over. And it's getting late and it's getting dark and everyone's getting very sleepy and my two friends abandoned me, they fall asleep and so it's just me at the wheel and it's probably 1am I don't know. And for some reason it just really didn't even occur to me to do anything else than like keep driving straight on this road. Like I never thought maybe there's an exit you should take Linds, maybe turn left. I don't know. I was just like, this is the way.
[00:10:06] And drove six hours out of the way.
[00:10:11] I know, I know. Six hours out of an already very long road trip.
[00:10:18] Thankfully, we were young enough and dumb enough to find it hilarious. And nobody was too angry with me. They made fun of me a lot, but they weren't that mad. And the silver lining is we got to spend some time in Durango, Colorado for a little bit. We grabbed breakfast, we saw the sights, and then we continued our very long journey to Albuquerque.
[00:10:39] I didn't know I needed someone in that moment. It literally did not even occur to me that I might need help. It would have been really nice if I had known that I had needed another person.
[00:10:54] And I wonder if today, maybe we need to know that we need each other.
[00:11:01] C.S. lewis wrote, When I first became a Christian about 14 years ago, I thought that I could do it on my own by retiring to my rooms and reading theology. I wouldn't go to churches or gospel halls. I disliked very much their hymns, which I considered fifth rate poems set to sixth rate music.
[00:11:23] Ouch, Clive, ouch.
[00:11:26] But as I went on, I saw the great merit of it. I came up against different people of quite different outlooks and different education.
[00:11:35] And then gradually my conceit just began peeling off.
[00:11:39] I realized that the hymns, which were just sixth rate music, were nonetheless being sung with devotion and benefit by an old saint in elastic boots in the opposite pew. And then you realize you aren't fit to clean those boots.
[00:11:58] It gets you out of your solitary conceit.
[00:12:02] When we break out of this idea that we got it, we don't need anyone else, we can do it on our own.
[00:12:08] It breaks us out of our solitary conceit.
[00:12:12] This is so tricky for us in our culture.
[00:12:17] It is the water we swim in, you guys. It is hyper individualization.
[00:12:23] It is romanticizing the idea of every person for themselves. Make your own way. It's you or it's nobody.
[00:12:31] There was a viral video trend a few months back of people celebrating when their plans were canceled for the evening.
[00:12:39] So they'd get the text, can't make it tonight. And they'd be like, yes. And then all of a sudden they're in their jammies and they're back in bed scrolling on their phone or queuing up Netflix. We romanticize this idea. We rejoice when we don't have to see other people.
[00:12:54] What is that about these days? We can go days, weeks, maybe months without speaking to another human.
[00:13:02] We have uber eats, Instacart, DoorDash, Netflix, Instagram, TikTok. I can keep going and going and going. We have everything we at our fingertips without even leaving our front door.
[00:13:14] In an article called the Antisocial Century, Derek Thompson writes, Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data going back to 1965.
[00:13:32] He goes on to say, a fundamental paradox at the core of human life is that we are highly social and made better in every way by being around other people.
[00:13:45] And yet we have opportunities to connect that we don't take or even actively reject.
[00:13:52] And it is a terrible mistake.
[00:13:56] This is not a Christian article, and I don't believe the man writing it is a Christian. He's merely reciting scientific research that humans are made better in every single way by being around other humans. It's the way we were created, the way we were wired. We were created for community and relationship.
[00:14:17] And in our faith tradition, community is not an optional add on to our faith.
[00:14:23] It is paramount for our formation.
[00:14:28] Look at the model we have in the life of Jesus.
[00:14:31] We don't know a ton about his first 30 years, but he gets baptized by John the Baptist and he goes out in the wilderness for 40 days, which is great. Silence, solitude, prayer. He overcomes temptation while he's out there. He comes back into society and what's the first thing he does? He calls 12 other people to be with him. You, you, you, you come. We're going to do this thing together. And then from that point on the overwhelming accounts of Jesus's ministry, he is with his disciples.
[00:15:01] We read of him going off to pray, going off being by himself. And that's amazing and so important, pivotal as well. Silence, solitude, prayer, spiritual practices and disciplines. But mostly we see Jesus with other people.
[00:15:16] This leads me to an incredibly important distinction. Community is a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot. It gets thrown around a lot here. And I just want to say there's lots of different iterations of community. Gyms, sports leagues, book clubs, mommy meetups, you can find community. And out in our society, it's everywhere. But here, within a faith community, we need to examine the type of community that Jesus gathered and who Paul writes to the early church. Because these are not groups of people with similar interests and ideologies. They aren't just good hangs. Right. We do ourselves a disservice to think that faith communities purpose is for us to find our next bff.
[00:16:05] My eight year old daughter Luca. She's going into the third grade and last year she became very good friends with a little girl named Emmy. They were inseparable. We heard non stop about Emmy, we had play dates, we got to know her mom a little bit. And a couple weeks ago we found out that Emmy is moving to California. Speaking of California, they're stealing my kid's best friend.
[00:16:32] And we knew this is going to be brutal. Like this is not going to be fun to walk through this with Luca.
[00:16:39] So she finds out and is of course devastated, like so upset, crying, emotional.
[00:16:45] I go with her back to my bedroom, we're sitting on the bed, I'm crying with her and I'm just letting her vent and be sad and be angry and all the things.
[00:16:54] And in the midst of something she said, I don't know, maybe I made the mistake of saying you'll make new friends. I shouldn't have done that. She exclaims. But Emmy is my bffae, you guys. I don't claim to know all the lingo, I really don't. I'm getting too old for that. But I thought BFF was like a tried and true. Like that's not going anywhere. I thought we all agreed BFF is not up for evolution. Right? That's where it stays. But nope, nonetheless.
[00:17:26] Look, I don't. I'm sorry, sweetie, I don't know what that means.
[00:17:30] And she goes, best friends forever and ever.
[00:17:36] And I. It was heartwarming and heartbreaking and all the things and now we all know and can sound just as cool as my 8 year old kid.
[00:17:45] Best Friends forever and ever.
[00:17:47] And hear me when I say I genuinely hope and pray that you all find your next BFFAE within these walls. I really do. I have found deep, very meaningful friendships here in this place.
[00:18:03] But when we think that our faith communities are where this has to happen, that that is their purpose, and maybe we keep searching for a different faith community that will fill this need, or we are disappointed or hurt, or when we don't find, when we don't find community or best friends within our community, when we think that that faith community is not working or is not healthy, then I think we might be missing the point.
[00:18:34] We need to look at the example that Jesus gives us in scripture. Look at the group of people he calls to be around him. They spent every day together. This was the community of Jesus. He gathered together 12 people that could not be more different from one another.
[00:18:53] Simon, the zealot, who was anti Rome, pro revolution, sometimes pro violent revolution. Then we have Matthew, the Jewish tax collector who literally worked for Rome, stealing and cheating his very own people.
[00:19:10] We have Peter, Andrew, James and John, who were uneducated young fishermen. This is only half of the group, but Jesus gathered them together and said, be like me, do as I do and do it together. He goes even beyond that, not letting them hang out in the 12, but he sends them out two by two in Mark, chapter six. How much you want to bet Simon and Matthew got paired together like I'm pretty sure they did, because God's hilarious like that.
[00:19:40] We won't know until we get into heaven. But I'll collect my money from you all when that day comes. I'm proven right.
[00:19:47] Henri Nouwen said, community is the place where the person you least want to live with always lives.
[00:19:56] Sometimes you are close and that's wonderful.
[00:19:59] Sometimes you don't feel much love and that's hard.
[00:20:03] But we can be faithful. We can build a home together and create space for God and for the children of God.
[00:20:13] The people in this room may not end up becoming your very best friends that you do all of life together, grow old together, watch your kids grow up.
[00:20:22] You will be hurt and you will have the opportunity to forgive.
[00:20:27] You will be irritated and you will have the opportunity to practice patience and kindness and self control. That's a three for one right there.
[00:20:39] You will also find joy coming from areas you least expected, like maybe from serving side by side with fellow Westsiders, maybe at the free food market or in kids classrooms. And you will find that your love for this place and these people grows.
[00:20:57] You will Find that you are being formed into the likeness of Christ as you lean into this community.
[00:21:05] And lastly, community is important because it's how the watching world sees Jesus.
[00:21:12] We don't see Jesus in bodily form anymore, right? He was crucified, resurrected, and we know from scripture he's now saved, seated at the right hand of the Father. But we are not called the Body of Christ for funsies like we are called the Body of Christ because we are the Body of Christ.
[00:21:33] We are his hands and his feet to a watching and hurting world that needs desperately to know the love of Jesus.
[00:21:43] This faith community is called to be that for our greater community.
[00:21:51] Pastor Evan spoke two weeks ago about the good life and how it is not money, success, good looks, power, but it as Romans 14 says, Righteousness, peace and joy.
[00:22:04] And we as the Body of Christ are called to exemplify this good life that Jesus talked about on the sermon in the Sermon on the Mount. And as we live these things out, we will begin to look more and more like the light of the world, like a city on a hill that cannot be hidden. We will be the poster children for what salvation and life in the kingdom looks like.
[00:22:30] Brian Zahn writes, a community of grace, peace and forgiveness is itself a proclamation. The most powerful sermon we preach is the way we live together.
[00:22:44] I have a modern day parable for you that exemplifies this perfectly. It was 2008 and the Gainesville State School Tornadoes were coming to play a Friday night football game in Grapevine, Texas against the Faith Christian Lions.
[00:23:01] Faith Christian was a private school with lots of funds, new equipment and a huge dedicated fan base. Friday night football in small town Texas. Just picture that the Tornadoes were a group of high school boys all serving time in a juvenile detention center for felonies they had committed.
[00:23:22] Not only did they not have fans or cheerleaders, but most were estranged from their families, having little to no contact with them at all.
[00:23:31] Every game they played was an away game.
[00:23:34] When the Lions head coach learned this team was coming to play against his team, he had a radical idea.
[00:23:41] He sent an email out to the faithful, which is the fan base for the Faith Christian Lions. And he asked them to sit on the Tornadoes side of the stadium.
[00:23:52] And in his email to this group he said, these boys have never had anyone cheer for them before.
[00:23:58] They need to know they are just as valuable as anyone else.
[00:24:04] So game night comes and over 200 people show up for the Tornadoes. They made banners that said Go Tornadoes, you can do it. They had signs with the players, numbers and names on them. They had cheerleaders and a Spirit line all for this group of boys who had never experienced anything like this before.
[00:24:25] The Tornadoes showed up and were shocked. And in an interview after the game, one of the high school Tornado players said, it was so weird hearing these parents cheer and yell for us to hit their kid again and tackle their kid again. But they were doing it. They were shouting and cheering when their kids would get tackled.
[00:24:45] The Tornadoes unfortunately lost that game that night, but you would never know it. It was like they won the Spirit Super Bowl. After the time ran out on the clock, they grabbed the Gatorade bucket, they pour it over their coach's head. They're laughing and celebrating.
[00:25:03] So excited to have experienced something like this.
[00:25:06] Both teams gathered in the center of the field at the end of the game to pray.
[00:25:11] And the quarterback for the Tornadoes asked if he could do the honor.
[00:25:15] He said, lord, I don't know how this happened, but I never would have known there were so many in the. So many people in the world who cared about us.
[00:25:25] After the prayer, the Gainesville players were escorted by armed guards back to their bus where goodie bags waited on each seat. For each player there was a cheeseburger, a Gatorade, a Bible, some snacks and a handwritten letter from a faith Christian family saying, we care about you, we love you, will be praying for you.
[00:25:49] Those boys lives were changed forever from that experience, I guarantee it. They felt the love of Jesus through a community of faith and dare I say that is the whole stinking point for a watching, hurting world to experience and know the love of Jesus through the body of Christ, the community of Jesus, the community of Westside Church.
[00:26:19] John 13:35 says they will know we are disciples by our love, by our love, our love for each other. Can we forgive? Can we live in unity? Can we do this thing together? And then our love for the people outside these four walls who need love desperately.
[00:26:42] As we close this morning, I want to invite you to respond and there's a couple ways you can do that today.
[00:26:48] The first is maybe you want to say yes to Jesus for the first time. Maybe you want your own backyard Bible club moment here this morning.
[00:26:57] And I just want to say that's a really big deal. That's life changing. Five year old Lindsay is jumping up and down saying Jesus is going to live in your heart and everything is going to be different.
[00:27:08] I celebrate you today. I acknowledge this decision and I say that you are so welcome here and there is a seat for you at this table.
[00:27:22] Maybe for others of you, the word community feels complicated, maybe a little triggering.
[00:27:28] Maybe some of you have been hurt by a faith community before.
[00:27:32] Maybe some of you have been hurt by this. This faith community.
[00:27:37] I've been there as well.
[00:27:39] This is not a perfect place, but it is a community of grace, a community that is learning how to love like Jesus and how to keep making space for other people.
[00:27:54] So if you've been hesitant to engage or reengage, maybe this is your invitation today to do so, to have a little vulnerability, a little bit of risk, and say yes to getting involved.
[00:28:11] The last way you can respond today is to get involved. I was in a meeting the other day, and Pastor Evan said the number one way to find community at Westside Church is by signing up to serve.
[00:28:25] There are so many ways, so many teams that you can volunteer on and give of your time, whether it's holding babies in the nursery, running a camera for the production team. My production team said amen.
[00:28:39] Brewing coffee on a Sunday morning or hanging out with high schoolers on a Sunday night. There are so many ways to show up, to make this place feel like home for someone else.
[00:28:51] And in doing so, this place becomes home for you.
[00:28:56] Jesus, after all, said, I did not come to be served, but to serve.
[00:29:03] And when we give ourselves in this way, when we give our lives away in this way, we will discover the surprising joy of belonging, of purpose, and of community.
[00:29:16] So whatever your next step might be today, I encourage you to take it, because this right here is where Christ is formed in us.
