One of the essentials of the healthy Christian life is true community. When we look at the life of Jesus we see that He spent time with large crowds - multitudes of people adding up to thousands at a time. But most of his teaching seemed to take place within the smaller gatherings with his disciples. We know it included the 70 that were sent out, but even more, we see Jesus spending time with the 12. Within the 12, we see Jesus spending even more time with 3 - Peter, James, and John. These guys did life together. They ate together, traveled together, ministered together.
We see the same thing in the life of Paul. He preached to very large crowds, taught many, but spent a great deal of time with guys like Timothy and Titus.
It seems that the greatest development of disciples took place in the smaller groups who shared life. That is the essence of what I mean when I talk about community. We realize that the heart of Christian growth - discipleship and development doesn't take place during the Sunday morning time of corporate worship. Therefore, we will be a church with a heavy emphasis on COMMUNITY. (Notice I said - WILL BE - It will be a little while before we are ready to take any major steps in the area of establishing community groups - but it will come!)
I have been reading a number of guys and their approaches to community and wanted to point you to one of them - Drew Goodmanson and Kaleo church. Kaleo is moving toward community as I have envisioned it, so I encourage you to check out where they are headed. HERE'S a link.
In the end, NCCd will resemble 1st Century house churches in many ways - we will have people meeting on various days of the week functioning as the church all over the city. These groups will minister to one another, will learn together, will serve our city together and on Sundays, we will come from all over middle Georgia gathering for worship.
