There is a verse in the Bible that says, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Mathew 6:21) Treasure can play out in our lives in many ways. What are our lives all about? Where do we invest our time? What do we think about? Where do we direct our money? These questions come down to what we
A Church who dumps toxic trash in the lake... on purpose
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think is important; what are our priorities? Some people call this their values or the guts of their vision, or what they are about. We call the bottom-line crucial passions of our church our heartbeat.
Our hope is to see people’s heart rhythms resonate with our own.
It’s one thing to set goals for our lives and to dream about what we might be or accomplish someday. It’s a totally different thing to be in touch with what needs to happen in our daily rhythms to be the kind of people that can accomplish meaningful things over a life time.
What if one of life’s secrets is less about the pie in the sky 10 year plan for taking over the world (or your picture of success) and more about consistency? How can I be a person that lives everyday in touch with what is important?
No doubt we’d like our church to be a cool and relevant place. We want to streamline things and focus on the big deals in life. On the flip side, we don’t want to be so consumed with being edgy and cool that we get to the end of a chapter feeling good about ourselves but not having much to show for our time. It seems that tapping into a consistent rhythm of vital priorites (we call them heartbeats) is how we can achieve a prolonged balance.
The heart of our church beats for the following:
- Lives journeying closer to God. This means more than “making a decision to follow Jesus”. We're talking about making a decision to make all kinds of decisions everyday to let God be in charge of our lives.
- Exploring a conversation with God. We don’t have the angle on praying. We figure simple is best; have a conversation with a God that listens and that communicates with us. Open up the Bible, it’s guaranteed God communication.
- Living in a community. We gave up the dream of a perfect church ages ago. If church is about people, then baggage and hypocrisy come with the territory. But we believe deeply that growth and change happens best in the mix of relating to others on the journey.
- Applying our faith. I heard a guy say, “the last thing we want to do is to increase the gap between what we know and what we apply,” when that happens we become spectators of our faith rather than participants.
- Being the real deal. Anyone can fake their way through life. We thrive on being raw and real. Bring your doubts, issues, addictions, questions, fears, insecurities and lay them out before a God who cares and helps. God has a thick skin.
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