We’ve spent most of the last eight months in the book of Revelation.
It’s time for a change.
In January, we introduced you to our ECC Rule of Life. A few weeks later, we invited you to take part in a Rule of Life inventory in which you were invited to consider your own engagement in each of the Five Distinctives of our rule of life: Community, Worship, Service, Generosity, and Apprenticeship.
Near the end of the inventory, we asked respondents to consider which two of the Five Distinctives they most wanted to grow in. Fifty-seven percent named Apprenticeship.
To engage in Apprenticeship is to intentionally make room in our lives to learn, grow, and spend time with Jesus as a community and in our personal soul-training practices. John Mark Comer, author of the book, Practicing the Way, defines this process with three brief sentences, which form the backbone of his book:
- Be with Jesus.
- Become like him.
- Do as he did.
Put another way, as we apprentice ourselves to Jesus, we will experience the kind of life Jesus lived when he was with us—a life that is eternal, abundant, and free. It is the way we were meant to live, and it is available to us all—as human beings created in God’s image who are in the process of having that image restored in us, slowly, intentionally, over time. Eternal. Abundant. Free.
We are calling this series, UNSTUCK, and it is all about freeing ourselves from our fallenness and the brokenness of lives lived ignorant of, or inattentive to, God’s presence in the Universe—becoming free enough to thrive in life now and to reign with Christ in the future.
Beginning this Sunday (May 12, 2024), we will lean into what it means to become unstuck by apprenticing ourselves to Jesus. We will dive into Scripture and, in cooperation with the Holy Spirit, mine the text for what God has to say to us about what it means to learn, grow, and spend time with Jesus—to be with him, become like him, and do as he did.
Each week, I will draw from my own experience of how God has transformed me and continues to do so. Others who preach will do the same. To borrow a phrase from the late Dallas Willard, we want to serve what we’re cooking. We want to share with you passages and soul-training practices that have shaped us.
I’ll leave you with a few words from John Mark Comer which I found particularly inspiring, and I hope to see you Sunday!
Something approaching Christlikeness is possible in this life. It really is. We can be healed, we can be set free of broken patterns that stretch back generations, we can be transformed into people who are genuinely pervaded by love and joy and peace. Our souls can throb with the bliss of union with God. Our bodies can become temples; our neighborhoods, holy ground; our days, eternity in time; our moments, miracles. (Practicing the Way, pp.116-117)