Be Family Around a Table | Community E1

Hey friends, it's John Mark, our team of practicing the way is really excited for our upcoming pastor conference happening January 26th through 28th of 2026 here in Los Angeles. The conference has sold out for in-person tickets, but if you are a pastor who still wants to gather with your team or a few friends and explore what formation looks like in your context, we have a watch gathering option for you. Our team can join remotely and watch each session live or on demand. We've also created resources designed to help your team process what you're learning and discern your next steps together. There is a lot riding on our shoulders as leaders, but we don't have to go on this journey alone. Learn more about watch gatherings at practicingtheway.org/pastorconference. Hello and welcome to the John Mark Orma Teachings podcast. My name is Yinka Dawson and I'm your host. Each week we feature teachings by John Mark or other voices in the formation space. Thanks for joining us. Today we start a new series and community with new teachings from John Mark. He recently gave these invented church in LA. In the first episode, John Mark impacts why community is essential to spiritual formation, the dangers of isolation and individualism and how practicing life together by sharing meals has the potential to reshape us into people of love. Here's John Mark. Good morning, everybody. I was a little scared there when he said the disappointing part. So I'm happy to be on the right side of that. You never know. The peace of the Lord be with you. It's really a delight. I love teaching here, I love Dave and Gary and your leaders and I love you as a community and what God is turning in your heart. So thank you for listening. In advance, please turn your Bibles to Mark chapter 3. Mark chapter 3 and once you are there, there should be a Bible in the seat in front of you. Once you are there, stand with me for the reading of Scripture. Let me just curate for you a short moment of pause to just take in the quiet, take a few deep breaths and I would invite you to ask the Holy Spirit to fill you even more. And to speak to you over this next time together, come Holy Spirit. You may want to just pray a short prayer of surrender. God comes to an open and yielded heart. To broken and contrite heart, these Lord, you will not despise. And if you don't have that, then you can pray in Psalm 51, grant me a willing spirit. Mark chapter 3, verse 31 to 35. When Jesus' mother and brothers arrived, standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around Jesus and they told him, "Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you. Who are my mother and my brothers?" He asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, "Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother." Take a seat. He was the richest man in the world. As famous in his day as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos is today, the archetype of the American dream through grit and determination and more than a few dead bodies under his wake, he made billions in the oil industry. Yet, if you know John Paul Getty's story, the more "successful" he became, the more isolated he became. Movies have been made about how dysfunctional his family was, in particular the story of when his grandson was kidnapped and he refused to pay the ransom. His fifth wife wrote him more about their marriage and titled it "Alone Together." Not a great sign. He called LA Home as much as anyone at that level of wealth can call a place home. I drove past his former home on my way in this morning. We know it as the Getty Villa, just up the PCH, which in classic billionaire style was a reconstruction of an ancient Roman villa that was unearthed by archaeologists in Pompeii. Now, Getty passed away before it was finished and you all know this, it's a museum now, but here's a picture of the mogul just before his death at Sutton Palace, his home in England. And keep this up for a moment. I just want you to see he's sitting at the head of a table for, I don't know, 50 with golden candlesticks. You cannot make this stuff up in a literal palace, but he is all alone. God, scowl, etched into his permanent features by that age, not an ounce of joy on his face. All that money, all that fame, all that quote, success, and this is what it looks like. All through the Library of Scripture, there is this reoccurring literary motif that biblical scholars call the Messianic Feast. It's this picture of the coming kingdom of God as a feast with Abraham at one end of the table and in the New Testament imagination, Jesus at the other set with rich food and wine and every tribe and tongue and nation all at the table together as the family of God singing and making music and laughing and giving thanks to God the Father over all of it. This image is like the anti-Messianic Feast. And yet it is a kind of visual parable for the modern world. The average person today has more material wealth by, I mean, most of us in the room have more material wealth than kings and queens did just a few centuries ago. Yet many of us feel deeply alone. The sociologist Robert Bella called radical individualism, quote, "the defining trait of America." But really, it's the dominant cultural orientation across the West and it's spreading beyond that. Radical individualism is a term used by sociologists. It's just a way of saying we have been culturally programmed to prioritize the good of the individual over the good of the community, to put our own needs and desires and preferences over the needs and desires and preferences of any group, be it our country or our city or our neighborhood or our job or our churches or community groups or our families or even our own spouse or children. And the dark underbelly of radical individualism is loneliness. We can swipe right, we can move, we can quit our job, we can live wherever we want that we can afford the rent. But the dark cost to that, the tax on it is high. We sit at our table all alone. Now you are likely not a billionaire, oil tycoon. If you are, welcome to this church, I pray you tithe. But do you ever eat dinner alone? Do you ache to love and be loved? To know and be known? And yet do you, like many of us, fear it, too? Do you feel that push, pull dynamic? Do you feel a pull toward and simultaneously a push away from relational ties? These relational ties come with the capacity to get hurt, vulnerability from the Latin word meaning wound, wound ability. They come with commitments, they come with annoying people that talk too much and have bad breath and make a nasty casserole for potluck dinner. It comes with all of that, too. Do you long for it yet you're also scared you could get hurt or pin down if you feel this way you are not alone? We are living through a social epidemic of loneliness and epidemic is really the only fitting word. The percentage of people who say they have no close friends quadrupled in the last three decades. 54% of Americans just think about that. More than half say, quote, no one knows them well. 36% report they feel lonely frequently or almost all of the time. That number goes up to 51% for young mothers and 61% for young adults. Vivek Murthy, the former surgeon general of the United States, made waves when he called loneliness the number one threat to health in America. He claims based on his interpretation of the data that it's worse for your health and smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It's now been linked to everything from anxiety and depression and suicidal ideation to heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's and dementia. It's not just a U.S. problem. The United Kingdom famously appointed a loneliness minister a few years ago. Maybe you saw that. Other nations like Japan have now followed suit to attempt to heal this wound in the soul of modern society. This isn't even the main problem with radical individualism. The main problem for you and I as followers of Jesus, if you're on that journey, is that it is sabotaging our spiritual formation into people of agape love. This practice of community is designed to help you apprentice or disciple under Jesus. We define apprenticeship or discipleship to Jesus as a life organized around three simple goals, one to be with Jesus, two to become like Jesus, and three to do as he would do if he were in your shoes. And you cannot do this. You cannot apprentice under Jesus alone. Not you should not, not I would rethink it. I wouldn't do it that way if I were you. You just straight up can't because the whole point of apprenticeship to Jesus, if you pay attention to his teachings, is to become, this is my one sentence to some right, a person who is pervaded by the love of Jesus to receive his love deep into the core of your being and then because it's bottomless to give it away back to God first and to neighbor and even to enemy. Now this process of how we become people of love through discipleship to Jesus is what I mean by spiritual formation and the truth that cuts across the Christian wisdom tradition is this, spiritual formation occurs primarily in the context of community. As Dr. Joseph Hellerman, my absolute favorite writer on community has to say it, we either grow together or we don't grow much at all. So the problem is not just like the felt ache of loneliness, it's that we are stunted in our spiritual growth and our maturation into people of love. We're not becoming who God made and created you and I to become. Is there a practice from the way of Jesus, from the teachings and the life of Christ, to live in a thick web of relationships right in the midst of a global epidemic of loneliness in a city like LA where you meet somebody and they're four hours away for dinner or whatever it may be, yes, it is the practice of community. This practice is so simple, I'm going to like overcomplicate it to fill up five weeks of sermons just to like for job security, but it's really very simple. You just commit to do life with a small subset of people from this church or your community around a table. It's so simple and yet it is a radical act of subversive counter formation in our day and age. Over the next five weeks our plan is to explore five key skills for cultivating community in the way of Jesus. They are, be family around table, share your joys and sorrows, confess your sins and stay together to grow. On the docket for this morning is the idea of family around a table. Let's do a little bit more work through Scripture. Turn to the left in your Bible to Genesis chapter 1. I just want to trace a theme or what a theologian would call a biblical theology a little bit through the library of Scripture. Let's start in Genesis chapter 1 on page 1 of the Bible. You likely are familiar with this paragraph, verse 26. When God said, "Let us make mankind in our image and our likeness so that they may rule over the fish and the sea and the birds and the sky over the livestock and all the wild animals." 27. So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. If the unique language used by God in verse 26, let us make mankind in our image. This pronoun, "us" could be referring to a group called the Divine Council. It's a theological and a literary motif in the Old Testament, or it could be referring to the relationality that is at the heart of who God is. We know from Jesus that God is Father and Son and Holy Spirit. In a word later used by Christian theologians for Jesus' vision of God is Trinity or Tri-Unity. God in three persons in the language of the hymn, "Blessed Trinity." Translation, "God is a kind of relationship." And this is mysterious. It's really difficult to get your head around the Trinity with like a Western left brain and a lytic approach. You have to use your right brain. You have to use a different intuitive part of you and it will start to make really good sense, actually, because God is love and love cannot exist apart from relationship. This is arguably the most important truth in all of scripture. Daryl Johnson, a teaching fellow at Regent College in Canada has this line I love at the center of the universe is a relationship. And to be a Christian in his view is "to be alive and the intimacy at the center of the universe." Now whether the pronoun "us" and "genesis" is referring to the divine counsel or to the Trinity, either way, we are created in the image and likeness of a God who exists in community as a theologian said to me a while ago, "God is a family who makes family." It comes as no surprise that Jesus begins his preaching with a call to a family like community. Turn back to Mark. But this time to chapter one, let's just take a short stroll through Mark's gospel and I want you to see Mark's introduction to the work of Jesus. Mark chapter one, if you look down at verse 16, "As Jesus walked beside the sea of Galilee he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net in the lake for they were fishermen. So two brothers, that's interesting, from a family. Some follow me or that can be translated a printus under me, Jesus said, "And I will send you out to fish for people, for more people." At once, right there, they left their nets and followed him, 19. When he had gone a little farther, he saw James then of his ebony and his brother John and a boat, two more brothers, another family, preparing their nets without delay. He called them and they left their father's ebony in the boat with the hired men and they followed him. And the story goes on. The history and observation, but notice that Jesus did not have an apprentice like a Sith Lord. He had, a few of you get that, he had apprentice's plural. He called Simon and Andrew and James and John, families, and he called them to quote, "Fish for people from the beginning." It's crystal clear in the mind of Jesus. His intention is to form a new community, turn the page chapter 3, look down to verse 13. Jesus went up on a mountainside and called to him those he wanted from this kind of larger group of disciples and they came to him. He appointed twelve that later are called the apostles, that they might be with him first and that he might send them out to preach and to have authority to drive out demons. These of the twelve be appointed, Simon, to whom he gave the name Peter, James, and of Zebedee. And this list, I won't read it to you. It is the most like unexpected list. You have a zealot on there, which was essentially like a gorilla domestic terrorist against the Roman Empire. Then you have a tax collector who is a Benedict Arnold working for the Roman Empire. Take whatever the farthest right left extreme we have in our politics right now and then like multiply by 10x each way, just sitting at the table together with Jesus, right? This is like Jesus genius here is beautiful. All I want you to see is notice how many apostles, twelve, why twelve? Why not twenty one? Why not seventy? Why not a thousand? Because this is a highly symbolic act. Jesus is intentionally naming twelve apostles to prophetically evoke the twelve tribes of Israel. It's a way of saying he is reforming Israel that his new kind of community is like a new Israel, a new people who are set apart for God. In fact, if you read ancient Christian literature, the Greco-Roman's very early on began calling the Christians a third race or a new race, not quite Jewish, not quite Gentile, not really Roman or Barbarian or Syrian or Aramaic or North African, but a new entity. But this new race was not based on blood, rather on something else, look down at verse 32. Let's read it again. A crowd was sitting around them, they told them your mother and brothers are outside looking for you and teaching opportunity for the rabbi. Who are my mother and my brothers? Yes, people are thinking Mary and Jude and Joseph, then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers, whoever does God's will." This would have been a radical line in Jesus' tight familial honor, shame, culture. Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother. This is Jesus' way of saying his community, yes, it's like a new Israel, but it is to function like a family. What we call church is not an event on Sunday, it's not a service, it's not a podcast, it's not a 501(c)(3), it's certainly not a building. It is a new kind of family, not based on blood, but based on a apprenticeship to Jesus and through him to the Father. The word Jesus uses here is Adelefoy in Greek, can you say that? Well done. This is the word you should know. It basically just means brothers and sisters or siblings, brethren is the old school English translation, the writer Paul uses, just the writer Paul in the New Testament uses the word Adelefoy over 130 times in his letters, not to mention all sorts of other family imagery and language. No other metaphor for the community of Jesus occurs more frequently in the New Testament than family. The church is also likened to a temple, to a house, to a body, to a city on a hill, but for the most part, those are one-off analogies. The analogy used over and over and over again is family. Let me show you at least one more Romans chapter 8 to the right. Turn to Romans chapter 8, Paul is the writer of Romans, this is a letter he wrote to the church in Rome. It's essentially the first kind of Christian theologian on the other side of Jesus. And I want you to see how Paul is working out the redemption of Jesus through this mental model, not only a family, but of adoption. Look at chapter 8, verse 14. For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you receive does not make you slaves. This is in a world where two-thirds historians argue of people in the Roman Empire were in slavery. He says, "That's the wrong metaphor for your relationship to God. Not sure he is master and we are a servant, but the dominant metaphor, no, you're children of God. You don't live in fear again, rather the Spirit you receive, just the grace, gift of the Spirit, brought about your adoption to, and notice it says, "Sonship." Now, if you have a feminist way of reading the text, that's like, "Hey, that's off-putting. Why does it say, "Sonship," or not, "Sonship and daughter-ship?" Because in the Roman Empire, different than our culture today, there was no adoption of females. You could only adopt a male heir. It was pretty much only done by nobility, by the aristocracy, and it was done mostly for socio-political reasons, because you wanted to pass on your nobility after your political office, and if your son was a profligate or a loser or you didn't have a son, you would adopt one that you thought was worthy of your family name. Hence, Octavian Caesar was adopted and eventually became Caesar of the Empire. What Paul is saying here is radical. The two-thirds of people hearing this are enslavery. A woman would never be adopted, and he's saying, "See, this is what Caesar did." He's saying, "God, the King of kings and Lord of lords has adopted you, chosen you, plucked you out, made you a royal heir." By him we cry, there's an Aramaic word here, "Abba, Father," go to Jerusalem, I was there many years ago, and on the Sabbath, if you're sitting around, you see all these kids run up to their daddies and say, "Abba, Abba, Abba." This is just a familial term of relational endearment. That is now the kind of access we have to the Caesar or so to speak of the universe. The Spirit himself testifies with our Spirit that we are God's children. Now if we are children, follow the logic, we are heirs, we're not just children of God. We're children of the King of the universe. Jesus is our elder brother. That makes us royalty, princes, princesses, co-heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ to the kingdom. If indeed we share in his sufferings, so this isn't gold-bladed candlesticks and caviar, it's a different kind of kingdom. We share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory. Okay, one more. We don't have time for this, but I'm going to do it anyway. Turn to Ephesians. I want to see just how Paul is working out. We've been adopted. We're in a family. We're co-heirs with Christ. I want you to see how central this is to the work of Christ. Look at Ephesians chapter 2. Let's pick it up in verse 15, for he himself, Jesus here, is our peace. He was made the two groups one and is destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility. This is referring to the two groups, the Jewish world of Israel and Gentiles, which was a first-century Catholic, ethnic category for non-Jews, essentially. The racial animosity between the two was fierce. It would regularly turn violent. The level of racial prejudice and hate was so thick. These groups wanted nothing to do with each other. But Christ has destroyed this wall of racial—because Jew and Gentile doesn't map onto our American experience of, in particular, white and black, we kind of don't understand how much of a dominant theme this is in the New Testament. If you're reading the news and you're watching, this is still a major problem in the Middle East today. Christ has destroyed this wall of hostility, 15, by setting aside in his flesh the laws with its commands and regulations, his purpose—notice that verb—his purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body his own, to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, and the passage goes on, read it on your own time, it's beautiful. His purpose was to create one new humanity. If you ever stop to ask yourself, like, "What is Jesus doing right now?" Remember that about that? We talk a lot about what Jesus has done. We look backward to his birth and incarnation and life and teachings and miracles and death and resurrection and ascension to the right hand of the Father and the coming of the Holy Spirit, and we look forward to his return one day to make all things new, to catch you and I up as co-airs, to rule over the cosmos with him, but like, "What about right now? What is he doing right now?" You're like, "Is he just there to try to help you find a date or get a job or sort out the world?" Yes, he's with you and all that, but what is he doing? We know from the book of Hebrews, the New Testament, that he is in the heavenly Holy of Holies where he's praying for you, interceding before the Father, but what is he praying? What is he interceding for? What an intercession is a form of labor, it's a form of work, what is he working for? What's his end goal? What's his purpose? Best as I can tell from Ephesians and Romans and the ark of the New Testament is what Jesus is doing right now is gathering together a new family. From every tribe and tongue and nation, Jewish and Gentile and Asian-American and Pacific Islander and African-American and African-African and dudes from Scotland, everything, even that. Every tribe and tongue and nation and class and neighborhood and walk of life and subgenre of culture and forming us into a people, a new humanity, who are genuinely transformed in their inner being into people of love, enjoy and peace and wisdom and strength and godly humility and even weakness, encourage and skill and life and gratitude to one day the kind of people who one day could rule over the cosmos at Jesus' side. Not anybody can do that. You have to become, you have to be formed into the kind of person who can do that. The problem is we tend to think about, quote, "spiritual formation" through our Western lens of radical individualism. As if the point of it all, the point of discipleship is to shape me into a person of love. And that is not untrue, but it is a half-truth which is dangerously close to a lie. The larger goal, the tell us, is to shape a community into love. As the Theologian Stanley Grants put it, "God's ultimate desire is to create from all nations, a reconciled people living within a renewed creation and enjoying the presence of a triune God." This biblical vision of, quote, "community" is the goal of history as a strong statement. It is the goal of history itself. What is Jesus doing? He's forming a family, but this is very important. Please listen carefully to me. This is simple, but you need to get this. I hear the word family and what comes to my mind as a modern American is like mom and dad and 2.5 kids, and a horrible automobile called the minivan, parked out, you know who you are, sorry for the shame edition, but here, you know, we're Christians, we're good at shame. And a single family house with a green lawn and a white picket fence, whatever, like that's what comes into my mind, what sociologists call a nuclear family, which is a shockingly recent development in human history that is mostly based on urbanization and marketing technique, right? That is not what a 1st century Jew or Hebrew would have had come to mind when hearing Paul and Jesus and the New Testament writers' language of family and household and brothers and sisters, not are all family in the 1st century Mediterranean world was far more robust. First off, it wasn't five or six people. It would have been in oikas, the Greek word, a household. It would have been 30 to 60 or even 80 people depending on the level of wealth in your oikas, in your household. It would have had a patrofamilius, a kind of patriarch and matriarch. It would have had multi-generations of grandparents and great grandparents and kids would have aunts, uncles, cousins, it would have had employees and co-workers and patrons and business partners and neighbors all living together, whether in an urban environment or rural environment. It would have had what many cultures call kin, people that are not actually your blood but yet are like blood, like a brother or sister or a cousin to you. Social scientists call these groups fictive kinship groups. Anybody watching the Baris season 4 right now? No? Okay, I am two of you. I thought it was really popular, apparently not. I'm watching it right now with my son. It's one of many beloved TV series that is at its root about a fictive kinship group. So if you know the bear, there are three siblings, I think they're right on there. One has passed away, there's a hyper dysfunctional mom. There's an uncle that you find out after a while is not remotely biologically related who's bankrolling the whole thing and kind of scary. There's like multiple cousins that you figure out are not actually cousins, they just grew up. We just watched an episode where there's like a new person that they run a restaurant. They're like so your cousin is your cousin and she's like no. Your uncle is your uncle? No. And it doesn't even, and they run a business together. They fight and they argue and they grow and they eat meals together. It's a fictive kinship group, a highly dysfunctional one. This is not a picture of like Christian community or it kind of is a picture of Christian community, but not the healthy kind, right? If you know it. But there is something in this. Whether it's the bear or the Fresh Prince of Bel Air back there, we're drawn to this. The idea where there is a biological family, but orbiting in and out. There are friends, there are family, there's kin, it's multigenerational, something deep in our heart. No, we don't really have this and we ate for it. It's like we know at some subconscious level, primal level we were made for it. And it's a decent image for what Jesus is calling his followers to become. A community that is like an ancient Mediterranean family, a large extended kinship group who live and fight and work and make up and grow together. If you want to apprentice under Jesus and grow into people who are pervaded by the lot of Jesus, you and I need this. And need is the only fitting English word. But here's the thing. As important as this gathering that you're at right now is, and it's very important, you generally won't find that kind of community here. You may meet that kind of community here. It's actually one of the key roles that larger churches play, in particular in transient urban centers like LA, as a place for you to meet people to begin to walk into family with. But you need something else. Let me explain. There's a growing body of research from the social sciences that groups relationships and a different category is based on group size and depth of vulnerability. One of my favorites, and it's a widely accepted paradigm, is from Dr. Robin Dunbar, a Oxford who's an evolutionary psychologist, loosely referred to as Dunbar's number. This is not chapter in verse, it's not like under a microscope, you know, kind of fact. It's not capital T true, but I think it's a really helpful paradigm. Because our inner circle of relationships intimates, this would be one to five people max who deeply know you and I as we are and who ideally love you and I as we are, right? This would be your spouse or your best friend or your roommate or a beloved kind of companion through life for 20 years who just knows you at the core of your being. In the language of the New Testament, these are your brothers and your sisters. Again, we lose that. In our, there's so much side here, I have to discipline myself not to go down into patrilineal family systems and ancient Mediterranean kinship groups. But ancient Mediterranean families were patrilineal. You can google that later. It means your family was defined by the male bloodline, different than our culture. So for example, if I was in an ancient Mediterranean family, my wife would not be my family. My three kids would be in my family. I have two sons and a daughter, but my daughter's children, if she has children, would not be my grandchildren. They would be a part of another family. Inside this family structure, and the New Testament doesn't moralize it as right or wrong. That's just how the world was. Inside this family structure, the relationship that was culturally, the highest echelon of relational intimacy was not too lovers, it was not a husband and wife like it is in our post-traumatic Western culture because marriage was for the most part arranged. Your wife was never a part of the family she married into. She was always a part of her original family. So the highest echelon, like if you read ancient literature, the celebration, read Mark Antony, read that story where she literally leaves her lover to go back to her brother because your primary loyalty is to your bloodline family. The highest relationship was a brother and a sister, the most intimate relational knowledge there is. For most of us, the friending or accepting tragedy, our siblings will be the longest relationships of our lives, longer than our parents, longer than our spouses, longer than our children. This is the relationship in the New Testament that's used to name what our relationship is to be like. Now, of course, the tragedy here is that more than half of people in our country have no intimate, 54 percent. Not one. Read the news, interpret it through that lens. This is what happens when radical individualism goes wild and more than half of people don't have a single person to carry the load of life with. The next circle we could call our kin or family or friends who are like family or in Christian language, our community. This is like a fictive kinship group. For Dunbar, this is about 15 people, other sociologists would say it's more like 30 or even up to 50. These are people you do life with. You go on vacation together. You do friends giving in the fall together. You help each other move. You bring food to each other when somebody's in the hospital. You watch each other's kids, you help each other make wise decisions and discern the next step. This may be formalized for you in a home community more on that in a minute by your church, but this is kind of our Christian community. The next threshold is around the 150-person mark. Sociologists call this the law of 150 and it's debated, but some argue that 150 people is about on median the maximum amount of number that you can know. Dunbar and his team looked at everything from village sizes in medieval Europe, to indigenous cultures, to military units, ancient and modern, to corporate office design, to back in the day, how many people were in the average roll of decks and they kept coming back to this number. 150. Dunbar argues it's the maximum, it's the optimal number for human organization and we need this kind of larger village for what the Stanford Sociologist Mark Greeneveter called the Strength of Week Ties. If all you had was two incredibly intimate, amazing friends, what are you doing? You lose your job and you need a social network or you need to find out like a new dentist or you need a plumber because you have a leak in your house and your two intimate friends don't have a plumber. You're a screwed, right? It's like you and Google and death, you know? You need the strength of week ties, you need a village. I love the African proverb that it takes a village to raise a child, but adults need a village to in order to flourish and thrive. The final circle, I would call our tribe. This is just a larger group of people that we identify with and even get an identity at some level from a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose and meaning, a kind of 30,000 foot meta narrative about this is what life is and what it's about. We don't know these people personally, but this group is where we get a vision of life and are called up out of just our hedonism and our pain and our problems to live with meaning and purpose. For some, this is a literal tribe, others it's an employer like I'm a Nike person or I'm a whatever, others it's a sports team, for a lot it's a political party which causes great issues. And if Sunday is larger than 150 people, then Sunday is in this very important, beautiful category of tribe. And when it comes to our spiritual formation, I think there are two key, at least two key takeaways from this paradigm. Again, this is not capital T true, but I find it helpful. Take away number one, we need relationships in all four circles. Read the Gospels, Jesus had relationships at every layer. He had three intimates who were like his brothers, Peter, James and John. Not before his death, Garden of Guessamini, broken hearted, three, come be with me, I need you at my side in this moment of darkness. He had the twelve and a few close friends, Mary and Martha, Lazarus who are called friends by the gospel writer. Then he had this group of 120 in Jerusalem and then he had this larger movement that he left behind. In the same way, if we want to grow and mature into people of love, we need relationships. In all four circles of community, it's hard to get this right and it's not an exact science, but we need brothers and sisters, we need intimates to carry the weight of life. And we need our kin, we need like family around the table, we need to be part of a kinship group. And we need a village to like draw on and moments of need and we need a tribe to lift our head up. And it's very important to be a part of Sunday-based church. So well done that you are here. You could be a thousand other places. Some of you are thinking with you, I wish I was a thousand other places, don't blame you. But it is just as important to find your three and your twelve as it is to find a larger church in Los Angeles. Because secondly, our deepest formation, healing and growth, all happens in the smaller circles. And this becomes more and more true as you age and grow. We all need just one or two brothers or sisters to bear and carry the weight of life, what Celtic Christians called an Anum Cara or a soul friend. And we need a family, a kinship group to just do life together with around a table, not a stage. Now, churches come in all shapes and sizes and I for one celebrate, my embrace is wide. I love the global historic church. I love what Jesus has done and is doing in his family all around the world. And I especially love this church. But there are more than 150 people here not but and there are more than 150 people here. Which means Sunday here is in category four. This is your tribe and again that's really good and it's really important. But that means inside of this tribe, you and I in my own context need to cultivate smaller scale community if we really want to flourish and thrive. You know, I was a pastor of a large church for about 20 years, a room not that different than this one, three gatherings on a Sunday just like you. And I would stand out regularly and in a sermon or an announcement, I would say this church is a family. We're not a building, we're not a two hour event on a Sunday. We're certainly not a website or a 501c3 or a podcast or a social media account. We are a family, theologically was that accurate. I'm sorry, it's not a true question. I'm not feeling me. It's the Sabbath. I can't be mean to you today. Right? Yes. We were theologically that is accurate. Was it sincere to my heart only God knows that? But yes. Absolutely. That was not PR. That was my genuine heart. But then often I would stop by whole foods on my way home after preaching and I would get a smoothie as I will this afternoon. And often I'd be in line at whole foods and the person in front of me, some rando, would just turn around and say, "Oh, hi, you're my pastor." And I did not recognize this girl from Adam and Eve. Now, theologically, we are family. We're brothers and sisters in Christ, made family by the work of Christ. Functionally, I don't recognize her, I already forgot her name. I certainly don't know her story. I don't do life together. We don't share resources. We don't. We're not functionally family because you can't, that's not like a weird, angsty, anti-church thing. It's just a pragmatic thing. You can't be family with hundreds of people. Family is not scalable. That's what makes it so precious. So functionally, we need to find a way to be family. For those of you that are on the contemplative journey of prayer, really that's just about wanting to experience spiritually what is true of you, theologically, that your life is hidden with Christ in God. Community is a very similar thing. It's how you want to experience, relationally, what is true of you, theologically, you have been adopted into the family of God. To do that, we have to find or foster a modern-day kinship group. But this will not just happen in our day and age, quote, organically, or disorganized lead and certainly not in LA. Like, Gary and I go hiking every single week. We confess our sins. We catch up. We pray for each other. But since every single week is in LA, that means about once a month. Welcome to Los Angeles. It won't just happen. You have to sacrifice for it. You've got to bleed for it. You've got to spend money on it sometimes. You have to organize it, plan ahead for it through the practice of community. All we mean by the practice of community is the intentional discipline of actively building highly relational, joyfully connected kinship groups. Just families that eat and laugh and pray and worship and follow Jesus together. And the best possible way, in my opinion, to start is to gather a small group of people and to share a weekly meal. This act of eating meals together, I could say so much about it is a key theme in the Jesus story. Read the four gospels. Jesus is just eating constantly. There's a Luke in the scholar, Robert Caris, who's this fantastic line in his commentary on the gospel of Luke, quote, "In Luke's gospel, Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal." I like this, Jesus. When you read the New Testament, you discover that the center of gravity in the early church was the table. The very first story we have of the early church, Acts chapter 2, we read, "They devoted themselves to four things." Number two on the list is the breaking of bread. When Paul writes to the Corinthians about their Sunday gathering, he writes, "When you gather a quote to eat, not gather to hear a sermon, not gather to sing, not gather to prophesy, not gather to share your resources," all of that was a part of the early church. But if he has to nail it down to one line, it's when you gather to eat. You may not know this because it's not how most of us practice the Lord's supper today, but the Lord's supper was originally a supper as in a full meal around a table. It was a feast. The first Christians called it the agape feast or the love feast, which sounds very to Panga Canyon where I'm from, right, but it's not that kind of a kinky love feast. Not that at all. It was the celebration. The word they used early on was Eucharist, and it's really a bummer that we still use the Greek word because it makes it sound so holy, the Eucharist. But Eucharist just means Thanksgiving. It's literally the same word as our holiday. It was like Thanksgiving every Sunday night. It was the spirit of joy, grateful celebration that we have been saved by Christ, adopted in the family of God on a new path to a new destiny, wherever you think about the Lord's supper and Christians down through time and space debate the theology of the Lord's supper. But I think we can all agree on this baseline that eating meals around a table with other followers of Jesus is just core to the Jesus story. My mentor calls this dining room table Christianity. I like that. We need more dining room table Christianity in our world. So no surprise. This is our first exercise. Just to find a small group of people and share a meal together. This is your first time on a practice with vintage church. It's a little bit different than a traditional sermon series. Myself and Christen will teach on community over the next five weeks. But each week we will offer you a spiritual exercise, take kind of this aspirational idea of community and the language of Jesus, put it into practice, actually get it into your life. This is often the missing link in our discipleship to Jesus, you know, the social critic, Neil Gaming, talked about our culture and said we have a low information to action ratio. As we live in the so called information age, we are used to just like swimming and information, drowning in more information than we could ever possibly use in a thousand lifetimes. So we're socially conditioned to hear all sorts of really important truths and then do absolutely nothing about it. But as much as I believe in the role of preaching and teaching in particular, the role of Scripture in our formation, all by itself, listening to me, talk about community, will not change your life. It may open your mind to the mental maps of Jesus. It may open your imagination to his vision of church and life and family, but this will not change your life. You are not changed right now. You have a new imagination, maybe, before that to transform you, you have to walk it out. Our week one or exercise is to find a small group of people and share a meal together. This will be our baseline for the next month. So plan ahead on it each week, find a place and a time. One thing I love about your church is how you eat meals together at pretty much everything. I don't think I've ever been to a vintage event without at least Chipotle on the table. And God bless Chipotle. Your Alpha Pub is one of your great contributions to the global church. Just full stop. Bless you for that Alpha Pub. The way vintage communities work, you have to go through the School of Discipleship first. So for those of you who are in a vintage community just in recent weeks, just all you do this week is just what you're already planning to do. I think share a meal with your community. If you're in the School of Discipleship, how many of you are in this round? Yeah. Well, beautiful. Well done. Then you're all set. Just show up tomorrow night. There will be a table. You can sit. You can do life around a table. But all of the vintage programs on the growth pathway, Alpha, Rooted School of Discipleship and Communities all share a meal before diving into any teaching. All you need to do this week is bring your intentionality to it. And if you're not on that growth pathway, first off, I'm sure you are invited in. And if you want to just make sense of this, just find a few people to work this out. You're not asking people to like, be kind. Like, what's your name again? Will you please be family to me? But no. Not that. Not that. That's all you're asking for. That comes much later. Also each week will offer you a reach exercise, which is just for those of you that have the time and energy kind of bandwidth and desire to go even further. And we worked really hard to create a spiritual adoption, reflection exercise that's in your companion guide. So order that if you don't already have it. And it's in there. It's self-explanatory. And it's kind of there to help you find and form your own kinship. To end, this vision of living in community is hard for a lot of us, really to even imagine. Because it's so far from the radical individualism of our culture. It's often pretty far from church culture in America, in particular. And honestly, it's really far from a lot of our own upbringing or family. But this is the way of Jesus, the life, the teachings, the model of Christ. It is beautiful. I will tell you in weeks to come how it has changed my life. I am so far on the introvert scale, it's pathological. I'm the last person that should bear witness to this, but it has changed my life. I want that for you. It is scary and at times dangerous. I'm sure there are people in the room and you are carrying fear. You are carrying hurt. Your prior experience was not what I just said. It was more like the bear, like the bad episodes, thin like Jesus' vision. Go slow, so happy you're here. Thank you for listening. Move at the pace of peace. You are invited. You're always invited. And it is so simple, all you have to do is set the table. May God who sets the solitary in families make you into a family. May He bind your hearts together in love, may He heal you, grow you and form you into people of love. Let's stand together and pray. I love that concept of the four circles of community. God designed us for relationship at all four levels, from our most intimate relationships to our broader tribe. And our cultures often the circles that are most core to our formation are intimate and kin, where we have the fewest healthy connections. So to end, let's take some time to talk with the Holy Spirit about these inner circles. Start by taking a few deep breaths with me. Become aware of God's presence. And when you're ready, take some time to reflect with the Holy Spirit. Who are your intimates? Who are your kin? I'll give you 30 seconds here and then I'll have one more question for you. Now, ask the Holy Spirit, in which circle do I need to focus on growing deeper relationships? What would that look like? I'll give you another few seconds for you to listen and close with Amen. Thanks for listening. This podcast is from practice in the way. We develop resources to help churches and small groups apprentice in the way of Jesus. Thanks to the little thoughts of our show music. We're a crowd-funded nonprofit so everything we make is completely free because it's already been paid for by the circle, our community of monthly genders. Special things today goes to Adam from Austin, Arkansas, Brett from Huntsville, North Carolina, Grace from Jacksonville, Florida, Brandon from McCornium, Minnesota, and Jordan from Palmer, Alaska. Thank you all very much. To join these friends in the circle or learn more about our resources, visit practiceintheway.org. Until next time, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.