Dream with Me

It's the Sunday after our 2025 World Conference. I'm up at the Temple alone. I'm here in my quiet office amidst boxes, stacks of things to put away, and unhung pictures. Most are from my old office in Human Resource Ministries. Some things are new. Leaders from around the world have been here at the Temple through yesterday, wrapping up our Spirit-filled Conference week.

My office is quiet. It feels like the calm remaining after a storm. Everything's been nourished. The air is still. There is little sound other than a random noise or sign of life. My surroundings are returning to a sense of normal. But, I'm different. I'm heading back to Chicago a different person. I'm still taking in and reflecting on my testimony of God's presence this week.

Words in Stassi's Thursday sermon capture the invitation that seems to define the moment for me...and all of us. The words capture what we already know. What's prophetic and affirming about them is that they name the moment and the trust required to keep moving onward.

"Friends, we are pioneers in uncharted territory. We’re living in a world that looks and feels different than it did even two years ago...We could allow our differences to divide us. But we are first called to be citizens of a new community. Paul referred to it as our citizenship in heaven, part of the body of Christ, and members of the household of God. We have also called it— Zion, God’s peaceable kingdom, the reign of God, communities of joy, hope, love, and peace—to name a few. We struggle to find words to capture the essence of what it means to be connected with others in the way God has always intended us to live. That identity comes before nationality, culture, politics, or local tradition. It roots us in the peace of Christ. And it calls us to a deeper way of being. So what does it mean to be a citizen of this new community?"

This call to community is timeless, divine, and goes to the heart of the gospel.

Jesus was doing a new thing in the gospels. Jesus was born into a world of crisis. Israel was under Roman rule. Every disciple that followed Jesus went against convention. To restore righteousness, freedom, and favor with God, the Pharisees preached a strict interpretation of scripture and Law. The upperclass political priests of the Temple condemned both rebels and sinners to appease both crowds and the Romans.

In the face of this, Jesus taught a new community formed of repentance. Repentance, as John the Baptist taught, wasn't an observance of the Law but a purification of the heart. It meant a journey into the wilderness. Repentance required taking inventory of ourselves: our true longings, our individual relationship to God, and reflection on what we truly worshiped with our lives. To follow Jesus was to form a new community in which we loved God's freedom and generosity first, and we loved our neighbor as ourselves. I believe this is also the new community the Restoration envisioned in "Zion" and which I hear Stassi calling us onward to.

As we all go home, I ask that you dream with me about what Christ's community means to you today. Think about it for where you live: in your family, in your workplace, on your social media, and in your politics. In so many ways, this call to community isn't new. It's the same call to community that Jesus asked his disciples as they sought God in a broken and divided world.