Walking Wet: Walking Together, Not Alone

Day 1 - Where is your Antioch?
Where is your Antioch, your community of faith and learning? Is it dead or dying? Is it alive and growing? Before you can figure out where your Antioch is, you need to know what an Antioch is. Read Acts 11:20-30. What are some of the characteristics of the community in Antioch? Do you find these characteristics in your current community of faith?

Day 2 - Beloved Community
We all want to be part of a healthy, reconciled, authentic community. This is something Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. named the beloved community, one with the type of spirit and type of love "that can transform opposers into friends". Depending on your experience of church, you may be thinking that either being beloved community in a congregation is a no-brainer or a pipe dream. Read Colossians 3:12-17. How do these words provide a model for beloved community?

Day 3 - Authentic Community
Achieving true community is rare. According to M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled and Beyond, most groups of people only achieve psuedo-community, where the assumption is that everyone is the same, with the same goals in mind, and that everybody will play nice. True community requires experiencing the chaos of our differences and the emptying of barriers to communication such as “expectations, preconceptions, and prejudices and emptying ourselves of the need to heal, convert, fix or solve."

Read 1 Corinthians 12:12-26. What do you think it takes to move beyond psuedo-community to authentic community?

Day 4 - Changing Community
The church is people in community, so the church represents a lot of different experiences, passions, disappointments, gifts, attitudes, disagreements, challenges, and beliefs just like the real world. How do we do church with all these unique perspectives messing about? Read Matthew 18:1-5 and Romans 12 then ponder this quote from take this bread by Sara Miles:

"You can't be a Christian by yourself. You can't be more special or holy. I was going to be changed, too, and lose my private church for a new one I couldn't control. I was going to have to work with the people I liked at St. Gregory's, and the ones who irritated the hell out of me, and Veronica, and a bunch of strangers I hadn't even met yet."

Can we be part of a community without expecting change, in
ourselves and in others?

Day 5 - Reconciling Community
Read 2 Corinthians 5:17-20. Consider the following words from
Becoming the Authentic Church by Gordon Cosby & Kayla McClurg:

"We are the recipients of God's atonement through Christ's life, death and resurrection, but how can we claim to have atonement, literally at-one-ment, with God if we are not reconciled to the
diverse family of God?"

How can we seek to know and be known by people whom society might call our "opposites", in order to overcome the barriers that we have been led to believe were inevitable? How does your faith community practice the ministry of reconciliation?