Kindle Notes & Highlights
“The Dones”: those who still seek to follow Jesus and find real community, but who have given up hope that the local congregation is still relevant to their journey.
The church in Scripture was never a religious institution with weekend services and top-heavy bureaucracies. The church is the family Jesus is building in the earth and it cannot be contained or managed in any human organization. While it can take expression there, it also takes shape in many ways beyond it. That’s why I consider Church Refugees to
what’s most important is whether or not people are following Jesus, not which building they go to on Sunday morning, or even if they go to one at all.
Jesus didn’t start an institution, or a religion, for that matter. He came to reveal to us what it would be like to live in his Father’s reality—how his love would change us and how our loving others in the world would let his kingdom unfold around us.
That’s why Jesus didn’t tell us he would send us a book to guide us, a religious structure to protect us, or spiritual leaders to control us. He said he would leave us with his Spirit who “would guide us into all truth.” The reality of the New Testament community is that God lives in us all by the Spirit and thus has access to every heart and mind, and that those who know him would recognize that voice and follow him.
Your allegiance belongs only to him, not to people or organizations who claim to speak for him.
Resist the urge to find another group right away or to create one.
Then we won’t need labels to divide us. Brother, sister, and fellow saint will be more than enough identity for each of us, and loving each other in a mutual celebration of Jesus himself will allow his church to flourish where we live.
In their minds they do it for your own good. This is how they “love” you, by withholding their friendship until you conform again.
Conditional love
Just don’t try to get people to see what you see. Trust the Spirit to do that as you simply enjoy them where they are on their own journey.
Our unity will never come agreeing on all the finer points of doctrine or observing the same practices, but by caring about each other in spite of our differences and looking for ways to encourage others to draw more closely to Jesus.
“The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself in love”
What does matter is a growing trust in our Father expressed by the love we share for others. Participating in a local congregation does not save you, and not participating in one does not damn you, even if others claim so.
Love one another as he loves us, and that includes people with whom you have differences.
If love were the most important thing, we would be able to walk together and put his love in the world without being threatened by people who live out their faith differently than we do. I’m not suggesting that there isn’t right and wrong thinking about God, because there is. I’m just harkening back to Romans 14, where Paul invites us not to try to shape each other’s journey, but trust God’s Spirit to do that. “If there are corrections to be made or manners to be learned, God can handle that without your help”
Community is about friendships and it enhances all of life, where we live, work and play. Not all our friends have to be followers of Jesus. By caring about others and letting them care about you, you provide the fertile ground where sharing the kingdom takes place.
Having community is a way to live. We have to make time for friendships, space for new people, and learn to love people simply as they are, not how we would like them to be.
It is Jesus’ job to build the church and the Spirit’s task to show us our place in it.
Christ in us.
The Gospel was never meant to be someone’s source of living; it was meant to set a world free into the love of a Gracious Father.
instead of learning to love each other beyond our differences, every difference is a test of who is right and who is wrong. We get sucked into the same game the world plays of having to convince those who disagree with us of how wrong they are. I see the fallout from that every day in my Facebook feed, especially as people try to convince their friends that the truth they see is the truth everyone needs to believe. And the more insecure someone is, the more they are drawn into the battle over truth instead of learning how to love. We expend far more energy trying to prove someone wrong than we
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That’s why love is the more excellent way. Without it, truth won’t find its way in the world.
To find her we have to stop thinking of her as a “place” and see her as a “people.”
To experience that kind of life, however, we have to learn to live relationally, and that is less a matter of what meeting we attend as it is how free our heart is to engage others the way God engages us.
Growing friendships is how this family connects and how it shares its life with the world, and that takes some intentionality on our part.
I know those who’ve left their congregation want to find people quickly to replace what they lost, but God wants to bring people into our lives more organically as we simply learn to live in his love and love the people he puts in front of us each day.
God’s Spirit is the one who best arranges the connections he wants for us. He knows the people in your area he wants you to walk with and when best to bring you together. I’d encourage you not to look so much for a group, but simply live in the reality of his love each day and love those he puts before you, even unbelievers, without trying to convince them to believe what you believe.
take all the time you need.
and how your growing dependence on the power of his Spirit living in you will draw your eyes away from what’s temporal to that which is eternal.
Social media and blog comments might be a good place to connect as well, even if you can’t be face-to-face.
Embrace what God gives you, and turn from those things others want to force on you. Life is too short to let people manipulate you, even with the best of their religious intentions. You are to live to him, free from the tyranny of your own spiritual ambitions, and free from others’ as well.
You cannot love all the people in the world, so love well those God puts before you each day.
our institutional systems can be deeply flawed as they try to express God’s reality in the world, but that doesn’t mean we need to condemn them or think less of those who attend them. Our world is touched for the better by many of those congregations. Though it may not be the best way for your hungers to be met, resist the desire to reject others who see it differently.
He has many sheep and he does not lead all on the same path.
If he is not asking you to change, don’t let others press you towards it.
if it has taken you outside the walls of institutionalism, it was not to separate you from his people, but to draw you more deeply into the life that truly is life and to free you to share that love without any borders. His purpose was not to leave you isolated and scattered in the world, but increasingly transformed by love so that he can knit you into the fabric of his church as she is taking shape around the world today.
imagine what it would think if they really saw the followers of Christ loving each other deeply, from the heart. There he will be revealed in ways that will draw the most calloused sinner to recognize who he is. And then we won’t be scattered anymore, but one body permeating every corner of our world with the life and love of Jesus.
