Hi Everyone,
Next Sunday, June 15, we’re putting on a small “Belong Lunch” for a few newcomers who’ve joined our church over the past couple of months. I’m looking forward to taking the group through a few key things around what it means to ‘belong’ at Trinity Church Brighton. And I thought perhaps it would be helpful to share some of the basics of what we share at the Belong lunch here as well.
There are two key parts to the content that we go through in the Belong Lunch. The first is that part of ‘belonging’ to Trinity Church Brighton is around what we think it means for us to belong to God. The ‘vertical’ dimension of belonging. Here’s a couple of key points we make:
1. We believe that we belong to a God who is rich in mercy (see Ephesians 2). This means that:
– We’re not perfect, and we don’t want to pretend to be. We want to be a church where anyone can come as they are and throw themselves on the mercy of Jesus. We certainly don’t want to be looking down on others as if we’re better than them.
– We’re motivated to share the gospel, because God’s mercy is on offer to everyone.
2. We believe we belong to a God who speaks, through his word, by his Spirit (see Hebrews 4). This means that:
– We believe God is with us by his Spirit, and that the primary tool the Spirit uses to grow us and lead us is the Bible.
– Pastor’s like Simon and myself don’t give motivational talks where we try and get you to do what we want, but we try and teach the Bible well. We believe it’s the Bible that has ultimate authority, because in the words of the Bible, it’s God who is speaking to us.
All of this influences what we believe, how we decide what to prioritise, what we do when we gather together and what our community life looks like. That, then, is the second half of our Belong lunch – what we believe it means to belong to our local church family. The horizontal dimension to belonging. I’m going to come back and summarize that part of the content in next week’s email.
Hope you can make it on Sunday as we gather together before the merciful God, in the presence of his Spirit, to hear great truth from his word. Luke Wisley from BCSA will be opening up Psalm 34 for us and I’m sure he’ll have great insights.
See you then,
Matt