The Light in Our Eyes: Rediscovering the Love, Beauty, and Freedom of Jesus in an Age of Disillusionment

by Nicholas McDonald

Redeemer is a larger church that I tell people is constantly trying to grow smaller. We love our Sunday morning worship, but we recognize that having a covenant with such a large community isn’t really a relationship. Sitting in the back of a worship room once a week isn’t covenant community. Online streaming isn’t covenant community. Podcasts aren’t covenant community. Covenant community is a place where we’re committed to one another and known by one another. As we seek to plant more neighborhood churches around the city (where community can be place-based and even walkable), we encourage folks to connect with their Redeemer neighbors through geographically based community groups. So even if Redeemer is too large to be my community, I still have a good, healthy-sized community of Redeemer friends in my neighborhood. Community groups help us get together. But they also, importantly, give us spaces to speak the truth in love to one another, and these are spaces where we help one another grow into our Christian freedom.