Flagstaff Updates

Hey All,

 

Wow time flies! I can’t believe summer is almost over…and a friend of mine has reminded me that it’s been a while since our last update. So I’ll try to hit the highlights of the past few months.

 

Retreat

Back in May we held a retreat for the Refuge. There’s a little Christian camp near the edge of town at the base of one of our local mountains that was the perfect accommodation for our retreat. Just about our entire church was able to attend this Friday night to Sunday event. We were blessed to have world renown Bible scholar N. T. Wright lead our teaching times (well, OK, via DVD), and a handful of our folks facilitate discussion after each video session. The theme was “Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense” based on Wright’s book by the same name. Going through this teaching together gave us all a common language and understanding to build from which has been helpful…it’s amazing to see how often we refer back to that weekend in our times together since then. Along with some solid teaching we were able to enjoy a ropes course, archery, horse shoes, quiet times, meals together and a camp fire. The retreat definitely accomplished the desired goal of strengthening our community…both relationally and in our understanding of the faith.

 

As most of you know, we (the Refuge) don’t operate like your traditional church…one of the main ways that is seen is in our Sunday gatherings. We have as our stated purpose for Sundays to “engage God as a community.” That’s intentionally broad, as we try to rethink what it means to “worship” and “be the church.” (Nothing against more “traditional” congregations…we just feel that, perhaps, we’ve gotten a little too narrow in our understanding/practice and we’re simply trying to explore other forms - while staying faithful to God in the process.)

 

Along with that, something we’ve been trying to do is not impose “our” church (“our” in this case being the folks who moved out from Indy) on Flagstaff but to allow those who have come along side us to speak into the worship experience too. After all, it’s their church too…a sign of our “success” is seeing our newer people take some sense of ownership/responsibility in this church community. Please allow me to share a couple of ways that has become tangible for us. One of our newer guys mentioned that he really wished he knew everyone’s “story.” Before we left Indy, our original team spent time sharing our life stories with each other…but we forget that not everybody knows each other as well. What we decided to do was once a month we’d have a couple people share their story on a Sunday. Additionally, we discovered that people had some questions, issues, topics they’d like to have addressed as a community that our Sunday and midweek gatherings just weren’t hitting (I’m sure given enough time we’d eventually get there) but we felt that this might be a good itch to scratch…and it would help us get a better understanding where people in our community were at. So we took a couple of weeks to gather questions/issues/topics and then prepared some gatherings around these.

 

In addition, one Sunday we took a road trip to Canyon de Chelly (about 3 hours from Flagstaff in northeast AZ). There we had some personal reflection time on some Psalms, some sharing with one another, and some hiking. Sadly, Sophia tripped and broke her arm (or technically, a small bone in her elbow) on the hike. But besides that, the relationship building in the long car ride there and back and the communing with God in the midst of His creation was very cool.

 

This was definitely one of the highlights of this summer, and one of the big mile stones for us as a church. We took our first mission trip to Mexico (just outside Tijuana) with Amor Ministries. There were five of us from the Refuge who participated. In four days, five of us (plus our intern provided by Amor) built a house, start to finish. The family we built it for was a family of nine (a single mom, her sister, and seven kids). The trip was impactful for all of us…and we’re going to get a lot of “mileage” out of this experience. We’re already talking about next year’s trip…and friends we want to invite to participate with us.

 

This summer we were blessed to have some visitors. A team of eleven people from Common Ground Christian Church (our mother church) came to Flagstaff. They stayed at the Indian Bible College here in town and did quite a bit of physical/manual labor for the college. In the evenings we did a variety of activities to give them a taste of what life and ministry is like in Flagstaff (and hopefully instill a vision of what ministry could be like back in Indy in their respective house churches). It was good to see old friends and meet some new ones.

 

We really enjoy having visitors. If you’re a house church leader and are wondering what might be a good growing experience for your house church, let me suggest a trip to Flagstaff next summer. Just contact me and we’ll start planning.

 

Peace & Love,

Chris