Saturate | Gather, Go, and Grow Together as Jesus' Church

Learning to be a City Group
in Worcester, Massachusetts
that strives in grace
to become more like Jesus together

 As we seek to be a part of Jesus' Church in our city, with our city, and for our city, we do this in community on mission through Emmaus City Groups. Our first City Group formed around a neighborhood in Worcester, and then we multiplied into two groups formed around those we felt God was calling us to commit to friendship and community among. Multiplying has happened again and again, and we continue to pray and seek what God wants to do in us and through us next. 

I am thankful for how much we've learned about our hearts, attitudes, and defaults that too often turn us inward and away from who and where Jesus calls us to love and befriend others. It's definitely a learning process, but we're learning from Jesus, the best rabbi and teacher, with others who are hungry to learn, too.

Even more so, I'm thankful that we've seen His strength come through when we were at our ends, and how His grace is sufficient to draw people to be curious about why we would seek to love them and out city through eating together, listening to each others' stories, supporting and praying people through the ups and downs of daily life, seeking to serve our friends and neighbors in need while we celebrate their lives, and ultimately, setting our hope on Jesus and His Kingdom coming as we rest in His grace and peace. 

 

We Follow Jesus Together as We Seek to Faithfully Listen to and Obey His commands to Gather, Go, and Grow

If you're wondering why and how we do this each week, there is a great video from the Soma family of churches we are part of called Gather, Go, Grow. Maybe check it out. Or, if Jeff Vanderstelt's gnarly beard in the video is too distracting, you can just read some of the manuscript below.

With Jesus leading the way, we continue to think through how to have (1) an upward focus on who God is and what He's done; (2) an outward focus in our relationships with people and with the world; and then (3) how we let that effect the inward transformation we're experiencing and making sure we're helping each other go through transformation. So for us we began to use language like (1) gather, (2) go, and (3) grow to help us capture those primary emphases.

You'll find this true also in the Scriptures that when you look at the life of Jesus, you see Him with a few very close friends: Peter, James and John; He's got his twelve; and then He's got this larger community we following Him around upwards to at least 120 by the time He ascends. And so you see these different structures of relationship that help effectively accomplish the goal of making disciples. 

(1) Emmaus City Groups
(i.e. Missional Communities):
Gather as a Larger Group

We see the (1) gathering as the larger group where it's important to come together. We're even reminded of that in Hebrews 10:24-25 where we don't give up the meeting together as some are in the habit of doing, but we come together and we encourage one another. We spur one another on toward love and good deeds. You'll find that if you're going to take seriously the mission of making disciples in missional communities together out in the world, you're going to need to get people together to encourage them. They are going to get weary and tired. They're going to forget why they're doing this. They're going to forget for who they're doing this. They're going to lose motivation because they're going to get corrupted by the world speaking to them. They're going to have lies spoken to them from the evil one. They're going to be under attack. And that's the reality of getting on the mission of making disciples. Jesus promised us that we would be entering into a war zone. We need to come back from the day-to-day mission and gather together regularly to remind God's people how great our God is and what He's done for them in Jesus Christ. So not only are they filled with hope and certainty that God will finish what He started, but their hearts are warmed again in affection for Christ as the gospel of Jesus is proclaimed to them in a larger gathering where they can be reminded that He died for us so we live for Him. And so we found that you can't take this lightly. At one point in the history of our church, some people thought that we didn't care about the gathering, which was not true. But we emphasized going so much that we didn't talk about why it's so important to gather. Now we've learned that it's important to remind the Church that they do need to gather to be encouraged, to be exhorted, to be inspired, to remember that they have a God who is perfectly capable of helping them with everything they're facing on a daily basis. So we gather weekly, whether it's in a very large group or in smaller groupings of missional communities. Either way, we want them to gather to be encouraged, to be exhorted, to experience some basic equipping and get back out on mission together.

(2) Emmaus City Groups:
Go as a Missional Community
Living Life Together on Mission

And that leads to the "go" part, which we would say it's not only primarily about the outward focus of relation to one another and relating to the world, this is one of the best ways we're going to accomplish it (2) going as a missional community and living life together on mission all week long. And we know that's absolutely imperative for making disciples because you can't make disciples merely in a gathering. They won't know if they're growing up, they won't know what to speak to in each other's lives, they won't know each other well enough to even know whether they've been believing what they've been hearing in the gathering. They won't be able to pay attention to see if people are developing the skills of making disciples unless they're out in it together. And that's why Jesus says in John 13, "This is how they're going to know that you're My disciples by your love for one another." There's a communal nature to this discipleship that can't happen during a one- or two-hour event on Sunday. It's got to happen in the flow of life together in a community. That's what a missional community is learning how to do: be the body of Christ loving one another in the middle of every day life. Not only are we doing that, we're also being a testimony to the world. Jesus says in John 17 that they're also going to know that the Father sent the Son because your unity together in the middle of the world on my mission is going to be a testimony to them because they're going to see that the world doesn't have the power to change you like the gospel does, because it's the Word that sanctifies you. It's the gospel that changes you. They're going to see a living testimony of a people being changed in the middle of the world, and then their unity together will be a picture of God the Father sending God the Son with the power of the Spirit because it's a picture of the Trinity. Our time together on the mission God's sent us to is a way of us saying, "This is what God is like as He comes into the world." And we can't do that in an event. You have to do that in every day life while you're on mission with a group of people. And so the missional community not only gathers on Sunday with a larger group, but must as a group of people go to the world as God is sending them. And then while they're going, we've come to realize you can't expect all of the heart issues and all of the struggles people are going to go through are always going to be dealt with in a missional community-sized group. In fact, I would warn you from that expectation. I've seen a lot of people try to make their missional community the primary place where every care gets taken care of, every counseling need gets expressed, and then usually what it turns into is a group counseling session and they lose sight of the mission of making disciples and they forget that there's a world out there that needs to know about Jesus. And so though it's important that we care for one another, it's important that we counsel one another, it's important that we shepherd the hearts of one another, it's likely not going to happen in a group of 15-to-25 people while you're trying to get on mission together. 

Now the beauty is while you're on mission together, the stuff of the heart shows up. The mess comes to the surface. And like Jesus said, "It's out of the overflow of the heart that the mouth speaks. It's not what goes into a person that corrupts them, but what comes out of a person." So the beauty of being on mission together is it's God's way of squeezing you like a toothpaste roll, and the stuff comes out, and we get to see what was inside of you all along. And now we can address that with the gospel.

(3) Emmaus City Groups:
Grow in a DNA
(Discover, Nurture, Act)
Where 3-5 People Discover Together
the Truths About Who God is,
What He's Done, Who They Are,
and How They Should Live

 

So we want the gathering for the upward primarily though it's much more than that, we want the going as a missional community in everyday life for the outward expression of God's people on mission, but then we need something for (3) the growing of believers – we call them DNA groups – where we help people discover the truths about who God is, what He's done, who they are, and how they should live. They can nurture the hearts of one another in their unbelief, and their rebellion, and their struggle. And then as we speak the gospel into each other's lives and lead them to repentance and faith once again, then we want to encourage them to act that out in obedience both in what they're going to do and what they're going to say. So "D: Discover," "N:Nurture," "A:Act." We usually encourage that to be about three guys or three girls. There's some flex on that. We found, however, that when you have too many guys in a group meeting together once per week, it's very hard for guys to get a word in. Guys, at it is, are harder to draw out. So having three guys and an hour or hour-and-a-half meeting allows for a lot more opportunity for each guy to share something they're working on: to share what they're discovering, what they need to be nurtured in, and what they're going to act in response and obedience in relation to what God is doing in their life. And so we encourage those groups to meet once per week. So if there are three guys, take 20-30 minutes on each guy and ask:

What did you learn this week in the Word as you studied?

Where are you having a hard time learning what God is teaching you? 

Where do you need to respond in repentance and faith, and how are you going to act, and who are you going to tell about that? 

And so that's the time in which we're diving deeper into the person and their own real need for transformation. 

And this is how all three of these work together. In your gathering you continue to pull people back to the truths of who God is as we teach His Word and remind them of the gospel and as they go to the table and break bread and take the cup. And that helps reset the week. "This is who we are, this is what He's done, this is why we're here, this is what we're about. And then let's go back out together on mission as a community. I needed that encouragement! It was a really hard wee. Some people even prayed for me at this gathering this week. I really needed that. And then let's get out on mission. By the way, we got a lot of mess going on. A lot of us are broken. A lot of us need help. How are you guys doing in your DNA group? Are you meeting regularly? Are you working through that? Maybe in our missional community we can share once in a while what God is doing in our DNA groups and how it's changing how you're acting on mission?" And so the three of them are absolutely necessary for the ongoing development of our disciples so we have that upward, outward, and inward focus for their full maturity in Christ. I would recommend you ask, "How are we going to do all three?" I don't know if I'd want to do a whole lot more than that. I think if you figure that out, you'll learn how to really form and lead a church into the activities that are required to grow them up into full maturity in Christ." 

Next: Questions to Help You Grow

Christ is all, 

Rev. Mike "Sully" Sullivan 

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