Hey all!
Thank you for the Sunday off! We had a great time with our kids and enjoyed a wonderful message in Lenexa at church. Sherry and I hope Pastor Fred blessed your socks off! I haven’t had time to watch the service yet as we didn’t get home until right before our small group was to meet at 6:30 pm. We had just enough time to straighten up a little and get some snacks out. I thought about watching after but we didn’t get our group completely cleared out until 9:15 pm!
This morning I want to share more with you about this idea of community and small group. Our small group consists of five couples at this time. In our group, besides Sherry and me, we have four younger couples (younger than the Neubauers that is). It is a great range of ages. All of them have something going on in their lives. The wife in the youngest couple is a neighbor and we have known her since she was in elementary school as her family attended FBC El Dorado with us back in the day. That couple has had some health issues with their parents that have worn on them quite a bit. One couple experienced some major health issues with the wife suffering a brain aneurysm and nearly dieing and then her husband was diagnosed with cancer. They were someone we knew and weren’t really going to church but we invited them in. The husband in another couple has battled debilitating migraines for nearly his whole life. The other couple has their struggles right now as the husband is in round three of 12 chemo treatments for a kidney cancer and now has to be tested for prostate cancer. Wow! It is a lot but let me tell you one thing about this group. They are there for one another. Meals if needed, babysitting if it helps, co-laboring on house issues. Whatever it is that needs to be done gets done. Two couples go to one church, another couple to a different church, the other couple is not going anywhere right now since we left Augusta. They are searching for a home but all of them agree that the small group is important to them in their faith life.
This is what the early church must have looked like in Acts. They didn’t have a formal church for people to gather in on Sunday mornings. They met in homes, cared for each other, looked after each other. I am not sure yet where Fred took you all in “My Church” yet but you need more than just an hour in the pew on Sunday morning to be in community. You need each other. If you are not part of a small group, I would encourage you to reach out to someone and get one started. You don’t have to be a theologian or a scholar or a pastor to lead…you just have to love people. You can focus your group on a particular book of the bible or a topic. Get a devotional or buy a study and go with it. Find answers together if you are not sure. And then grow.
In the near future, considering that Sherry and I are moving to Andover, we have asked the group to consider finding another couple of two to join them and multiply. We will do the same in our new Andover neighborhood. This is how the Kingdom church grew in the early days. I bring this up because this morning I saw a study that said only 40% of Americans said their faith was of great importance to them and another study showing only 35.87% of Kansans said their faith was of great importance to them. Church, we have a problem! And we tackle it the same way you eat an elephant…one bite at a time. Find someone who needs community and then find someone else. Start developing relationships and discipling others. What if each one of us reached one other person in the next four months of 2024? And then repeated that in 2025? In 2026? Welcome to the church in the Book of Acts.
Don’t just talk about church…be the church!
Pastor Rick
