Welcome to the Conversation

Why do you have a blog?

At the outset that’s probably a good question to ask. Why would a church website have a blog feature? Why would the pastors and leaders of that church blog? Why are we doing this? Why are we contributing precious time that could be spent doing any number of others things that need doing in the church writing frequent blog posts?

(At this point I really hope people stay with me through a few more paragraphs…)

We are blogging because faith is a conversation. Church is a conversation. Theology is a conversation.

Scripture is filled with stories about what it looks like to live in community. Stories about God relating to, electing, leading, chastising, delivering, and redeeming a nation. A community. Jesus begins his public ministry by first forming a community. The Spirit comes at Pentecost and the Apostles are able to speak and communicate in different languages. The community gets bigger. New people are invited into the conversation.

The Bible itself is a conversation. The Bible is a collection of different books written in different times from different perspectives in different styles. There’s law codes, poetry, history,   literature, and correspondence. All set next to each other—put in conversation with one another.

The history of Christian thought is one of conversation. The historic creeds of the church came out of bishops coming together and deciding in community the basic beliefs of the church. The great theologians of the church aren’t writing in a vacuum, but rather engaging other thinkers to move the conversation along.

Faith is a conversation. Church is a conversation. Theology is a conversation.

Which is why Spirit and Life has always placed a high emphasis on small groups. Small groups are the place where Christians encounter Jesus Christ in community through conversation. But as we try to go about doing and being a church in the current era of social media and technology, we want to expand the conversation in a faithful way.

So we added a blog feature to our website.

Because we want to foster and engage in conversation in a digital space in an informal way. We want a forum to be in dialogue with you between Sundays. We want a place to talk about where we have encountered Jesus in the day-to-day. We want a place to engage current issues and think theologically about everyday life. We want a place to tell you about things that are going on in the church and invite you into our broader family. Simply put, we want a new place to have a conversation.

So we want you to lean in here. We want you to engage. We want you to comment. We want to be in conversation with you.

And if you’re brand new, if you’ve never been to Spirit and Life for worship and are just discovering our website for the first time, we want to invite you into our conversation here in this digital space and on Sunday mornings at one of our worshiping campuses.

We are the pastors and church leaders of Spirit and Life church and this is our blog.

Welcome to the conversation.