It's a great commercial, really. We all want to share good times with good friends. This vignette of meeting new friends on a family camping trip and connecting so strongly that you want to keep in touch certainly connects with me, anyway. And while a phone call (or emails, texting, or other more current modes of communicating) might not be as good as being together, it can go a long way in maintaining that connection from a distance.
As we've seen over the last couple of weeks, Paul is very interested in creating and maintaining connections among the many churches scattered around the world. He not only facilitated a collection for needy Christians in Jerusalem, he even arranged to have representatives from the various churches come with him to Jerusalem to deliver the collection. This is much more than just good PR. Paul's heart was to create and maintain real connections and relationships with real people in strong and meaningful ways.
Following Jesus' lead (see Mark 3.31-35), everyone in the early church called fellow believers "brother" and "sister." But Paul didn't want to just use nice words of relationship and family, he really wanted to live it out and see others live it out too. Of course, Paul didn't have the convenience of our modern communication technologies, so he wrote letters -- lots of letters. But even more important than the letters were his travels, his visits. He wouldn't have been writing all those letters if he hadn't first made all of those real and lasting connections with all those people (i.e. brothers and sisters) in places like Ephesus, Corinth, Philippi, and so on.
It seems to me that what we in the modern church have gained in ease of communication, we have lost in real connections and relationships with our brothers and sisters around the world. Just because we have access to so much information about what is happening all around the world; just because we know what groups like PWS&D and World Vision and Canadian Foodgrains Bank are doing around the world; just because we choose to support these and other groups financially; we seem to feel that we are more connected than we truly are.
I'm not saying we shouldn't support these organisations -- of course we should! Why would we have collected a special offering for PWS&D last week otherwise? I'm saying that we need to go deeper, make stronger connections, develop and maintain real relationships with real people (i.e. brothers and sisters) in real and meaningful ways.
And how do we do that? Well, that's what we're going to look at this coming Sunday. Using Philippians 2.19-30 as the starting point, we'll look at Paul's vision/goal for the church of real connections with real people in real ways. And we'll ask the question, "How can we make this a reality here at Nassagaweya?" My vision/goal for us at NPC is that, over time, this will become a distinctive identifying mark of who we are as a congregation. Please join us on Sunday if you can.
(PS If you weren't with us last Sunday and would still like to contribute to either the Centsability or special offering to PWS&D, please bring it along this Sunday. You can listen to last week's message about it HERE. Thanks!)
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