The Pain and Pleasure of Presence

Hi Church Family,

This month we celebrate 13 years of Harbour City worshipping Jesus in the greater Berea area. 13 years of faithful people being in community, loving, giving, sharing their lives, reaching people with the gospel and seeking to live out what obedience to Christ looks like. As we sang the Creed together on Sunday and saw the church engaged in worship, it was a reminder of how special being at Harbour City is. God brings people together from all walks of life, calls us his body and uses us to display the beauty of Jesus! What a gift it is to be part of this.

CREED

Somehow, it does seem fitting that while we turn “13”, we are also going through a series on what we believe. We are looking at the real core of our faith by going through the Apostles' Creed. We are now settling into the series, and this past Sunday we focused on God our Father. The idea of God as Father always has its challenges. We come to the topic tainted by the brokenness of our society and tainted with the brokenness of our own families. These challenges sometimes hold us back from being able to connect deeply with Him.

INTIMATE CREATOR

The opening line of the Apostles' Creed gets us thinking about God the Father and Creator. God as creator does not just point back to something that God made and that's it. He is not a distant creator, nor a distant Father. He is the one who knows, loves and remains intimately involved in creation. He also doesn’t just create with a new prompt inputted into a chatbot. He gets his hands dirty. He forms and breathes into his creation (Genesis 2). The call to call Him “Abba Father” (Romans 8) is the call for us to be involved with Him in this very level of intimacy. This intimacy, this love, this care that the Father has for his creation and how it shapes his ongoing involvement in creation must shape how we think and live.

STEWARDSHIP

We live in a world where AI is making it so easy to create. We input commands into a system, and it produces work for us. These systems create designs, build programs, give us essays and writing that we are not connected with. Make no mistake that I love AI in many ways. It has taken my ideas and abilities to the next level in some ways? But are we building a culture of increased disconnectedness? I remember when I was writing my master's (before we had AI help) and remember the toil one would have with the work would leave you going to sleep thinking through words and paragraphs and questions, wondering if the work was good enough, if you were expressing yourself properly. There was this painful but beautiful connection to every word on the page.

The danger is not that AI does some work for us. The danger is that over time we might become accustomed to producing things that we don’t intimately know, that we don’t value and that we don’t love. The danger is us forming habits of distance and indifference that not only shape how we work but go far beyond it.

CHURCH

The church is not something that can be produced through a prompt. I think we all know that. And yet we can approach church being shaped by the same distance, consumerism, and indifference learned from a life of work without intimacy.

There is this potential to be disconnected from this intimacy that Christ desired from his body, this intimacy that requires every body part playing its role, this level of connectedness that means every part feels the pain and joys of every other part. And it may not all be about AI. But as our appetites are increasingly formed and satisfied by the incredible worship and preachers on YouTube, podcasts and the likes. And as we chase after one experience after another. We can find ourselves coming to church every other week just to see what we can get out of it. Doing so while losing the intimacy of knowing, the closeness of people, the beauty of community.

This level of intimacy with people and community is not easy. There is no shortage of Reels and TikToks that remind us that people often prefer cats, dogs, plants and their own time to being with people. People can be difficult. Life with people can be inconvenient; it can involve misunderstanding, it can involve hurt. And yet it is through people that God give us friendship, love, care, correction, encouragement and a place to belong.

Sunday we were in week two of Andy’s challenge to be at church every Sunday for the next 8 weeks. A challenge to build the habit of church attendance. Now simply being in the room doesn’t automatically build community and intimacy. But presence is the first step towards building healthy community. And being present consistently gives us the opportunity to know and be known.

LIFE GROUP

Life groups at Harbour City are not just another meeting in a week. They are the real-life opportunity to build the kind of deep connection with his community that we believe we are called to. A space where we learn other people's stories, where we pray for one another, where we eat together, where we get to ask questions, where we see and are seen. Life Groups are the spaces where this deep, intimate connectedness to Christ's body is formed.

CLOSE

So this week ahead, let's consider not only what we believe. But how what we believe shapes how we live. How the intimacy God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth, calls us to resist the temptation to live a life of distance, a disconnected life, a life where we consume and dispose. Let us enjoy both the pain and reward that comes from deeply connected intimacy.

Thank you, Harbour City Church, God bless and much love, Jamie