For and Through the Church

Playing the Long Game in Church Planting & Renewal

What if the Church became known for raw honesty and unconditional acceptance?

What if the local church became the primary way of learning to live in and for relationships of authenticity and intimacy with God and each other?

And what if that became a reality not through people who are “leadership material,” but through weak, broken, needy, and even scandalously sinful people – people whose only remaining hope is Jesus’ grace and healing, and who are desperate enough to risk real vulnerability with fellow strugglers?

Could this have been Jesus' plan all along?

How?

Through the Church

Churches become intimate communities through broken people in those churches - broken people who are discovering wholeness as they learn to live in authentic relationships, to know and be known, to love and be loved, just as they are. These people could be pastors, or they could be overlooked men, women, and youth never thought of as catalysts for deepening community. But God works through paradoxes. Life through death. Strength in weakness. Wholeness through brokenness.

Equipping Congregations

As relationally broken people come to Abiding Together and experience Jesus’ restoring work in them through authentic, intimate relationships, they will, in turn, be sent back to their local congregations equipped and empowered to be instruments of restoration there. They will be the ones uniquely prepared to befriend the relationally broken in their church families. They will be the ones with the experience needed to cultivate communities rooted in the authenticity and intimacy made possible by Jesus’ grace and love for broken sinners. They will be the ones able to help their churches learn to live in and for Trinitarian community because they have been learning to live in and for it themselves.

Why?

Wholeness Through Brokenness

Scripture describes this pattern. When Jesus declared His mission (Luke 4:16-21), He said, essentially, that He came to bring relational wholeness to relationally broken people. Reading from Isaiah 61 (see bottom of page), He said He came for the poor, the afflicted, the brokenhearted, the captive, the blind, the oppressed, and the mourning. If we keep reading in Isaiah 61, we see that He plans to make them into “oaks of righteousness,” a grove of strong, solid trees, as it were, where together they display His beauty through their brokenness made whole.

Agents of His Restoration

But He doesn’t just keep them there in the grove to look pretty. He employs them in His mission (Isaiah 61:4). He sends them out, like a great army of walking trees, to repair and rebuild cities that have been ruined for generations. In other words, He brings relational wholeness to whole groups of broken people through the very broken people whom He has been restoring along the way. Could He do this through weak, broken, needy sinners in our churches? He says He can and will.

Abiding Together’s mission is to join in Jesus' mission for and through His Church.

Isaiah 61:1-4

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor;¹ he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;² to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to grant to those who mourn in Zion — to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit; that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified.³ They shall build up the ancient ruins; they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations.