Find Your People: Building Deep Community in a Lonely World Read Online Free PDF Page B

prevent the glory of God from shining through this city on a hill, a gathering of believers who are set apart for the purpose of displaying God to the world.
    We are called to be a community of people, on a mission, delighting in God, delighting in each other, redeemed and reconciling the world, bringing them and inviting them into this family. This is the ultimate purpose of community.
    Yes, it is to encourage you.
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    Yes, it is to comfort you.
    Yes, it is to fight for you.
    But ultimately community is meant to open the doors wide to every person on earth and invite them into a family that exists forever with God.
    Yes, a life of connection is for your thriving, but this is also for eternity.
    We must understand the war we’re in. We must understand that the enemy is subtle and sneaky and seeks to destroy you by destroying your relationships. We have no better defensive weapon than having the people who love God rally around us, fight for us, and fight with us.
    Maybe you don’t believe in God or in Jesus. If so, please know how glad I am that you’re here and how deeply I wish we could meet. And I hope you encounter in these pages a God who built you, loves you, and has a plan for you to live with joy and connection to Him and to others.
    We all crave a collective belonging. Because God built us for it.
    And what should be true of us who love Jesus and follow Him is that, because we have found our identity in Him, we enter human relationships without lists of expectations and neediness. Christ followers enter human relationships full of hope and full of confidence to love others, regardless of the treatment they receive in return.
    Oh, I am fully aware this is not our reputation. And I am genuinely sorry for the ways that Christians may have caused harm to you or to people you love. (Being Christian means we have been freed from the slavery of sin but not from the desire of it.)
    Truly, no one has taught me more about friendship than Jesus, and I hope as we journey together you will see how brilliant and full of life-giving grace He is. Jesus is the best imaginable friend. And He helps us become the same.
    How Did We Get Here?
     
    As I’ve already mentioned, nearly every generation that has ever lived has experienced a village existence. Between Jesus’s days here on earth and the Reformation fifteen hundred years later, a custom practiced the world over was that for every twenty-five young people in a given place, a school would be established. [11] In Jesus’s world, for example, it was actually illegal for a family to live somewhere without a school close by, and so for every twenty-five boys, a teacher would be appointed.
    Families whose children went to school together also worshipped together, meeting first in homes and then in appointed buildings as the community grew. Educational life and social life and religious life and vocational life and family life all bled together.
    Bottom line, people were in each other’s business.
    But that has all radically changed. Our priorities no longer center on “we” but on “me.”
    Individualism as we know it has long, deep roots that date centuries back.
    France saw individualism break forth in the massive anarchy called the French Revolution.
    Closer to home, the Revolutionary War against Britain by the United States was all about
    Freedom.
    Independence.
    Individual rights.
    I mean, come on. One of our first acts as Americans was to draft a document called the Declaration of Independence.
    “Independence!” was our battle cry.
    Independent became our core identity.
    Hey, I am terribly grateful America exists, and I don’t for one minute take for granted the freedoms we enjoy. But that independent spirit has a dark side. For the past 250 years, we have been declaring our independence with increasing pitch and volume, with greater and greater insistence that we can handle life on our own.
    From settlers spreading out and building a life for their families