As our congregation’s leadership has gathered over the past few weeks, we have found ourselves asking the questions, “What now? What is our next step? In light of where we are and where we believe we need to go, what do we need to focus on for these next coming months?” As we discussed these questions, a theme emerged: Back to the basics.
Back to the basics. What are we talking about when we talk about going “back to the basics? We use this term to speak about the basic faith and practices that have been a part of the Christian community as long as there has been a Christian community to practice them. In particular, there are 5 basics that we keep coming back to. They are:
1. A commitment to Jesus as the center of our faith and life and community
2. A commitment to discipleship – to personally following Jesus and growing in our faith and knowledge and love for him
3. A commitment to prayer – to personally and corporately seeking God in prayer as we pray to him and for each other and the world around us
4. A commitment to care – to sharing life and faith with one another beyond Sunday mornings
5. A commitment to welcome – to actively open our doors and step out and invite others into this shared life in Christ
These are the “basics” as we understand them – the basics of what following Jesus and loving him and our neighbour looks like. These “basics” describe what we recognize to be the basic character and practice of the Christian community that we rally around and must be a part of everything we do.
But the conversation doesn’t stop here. As we continued to work through this, we recognized these basic commitments lead us to making a number of smaller, more practical commitments to help us live them out together.
And so, in the coming months we are making:
1. A commitment small groups – we are committed to increasing the number of small groups that are available so that anyone who would like to join one will be able to
2. A commitment to prayer – we are committed to cultivating the culture of personal and corporate prayer in our congregation by offering both pre-service and mid-week prayer groups, an after service prayer team, and opportunities for our community to engage in prayer in new and creative ways both in the service and beyond
3. A commitment to care – we are committed to caring more intentionally for those who call B-FBC home by regularly
following up with members when they are sick, absent or home-bound
4. A commitment to engaging worship – we are committed to expanding our Sunday morning worship experience in creative and thoughtful ways that engage the whole of the Christian tradition we stand on as well as the language of the culture we live in
5. A commitment to welcoming families – we are committed to providing supervised Sunday school every week for nursery and early years-aged children
6. A commitment to welcoming the emerging generation – in particular, we are committed to planting a new worshipping community for young people in our neighbourhood to engage with Jesus and the Christian community in a new way
Back to basics. It means a commitment to the basic character and practices of the Christian community as it always has been and a commitment to some basic steps forward in faith that God might use these steps to continue the work that He began here so many years ago.
Joe Welty
Broadway-First Baptist Church 