A Gathered People: Becoming God’s New Creation

Wherever God shows up, there is a gathering.

When God creates, land, seas, sky, plant life, and other living creatures are gathered, bringing order out of chaos. With Abraham and Sarah, God’s call and covenant promise a gathering as numerous as the stars. God’s call to Moses gathers Israel for the Egyptian Exodus. God tabernacled among Israel during their wilderness sojourn oriented their life together. God dwelled in the holy of holies, which was the radiating center of life in the Jerusalem Temple and beyond, structuring a way of being in the world and calling the faithful from around the known world to gather. In the diaspora, when Torah was opened there was a gathering called “synagogue.”

The Incarnate Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth, gathered disciples and crowds around him throughout his ministry. When Jesus’ disciples heeded the risen Lord’s call to go to the Pentecost festival, God showing up in tongues of fire created a gathering. As the Christian gospel spread around the world, gatherings drew people from the synagogue, the Academy, Greco-Roman cultic society, and the Empire. The church in every era has been a gathering that forms people into particular ways of being that manifest the reality of God’s New Creation. From Creation to the present, God gathers God’s creatures by redemption and reconciliation in ways that manifest God’s new creation and God’s kingdom.

But what does being God’s gathered people look like? How are we informed in being gathered in such a way that our community becomes a source of ingathering? How do the Hebrew Bible and New Testament imagine our life together as God’s gathered people? What have we looked like as a gathered people throughout our history, and what impact does Christian tradition have on today’s ways of being Christian in and for the world? How do our routine gatherings intend to encourage us to embody God’s new creation and God’s kingdom? This eight-week series will engage these questions as we examine our lives as God’s gathered people here at Crestview.

Two recent books will inform our consideration of becoming God’s new creation:

• Hicks, John Mark, Johnny Melton, and Bobby Valentine. A Gathered People: Revisioning the Assembly as Transforming Encounter. Leafwood Publishers, 2013. [Amazon]
• Lemley, David. Becoming What We Sing: Formation through Contemporary Worship Music. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2021. [Amazon]

We will do our best to adhere to the following schedule. The teachers indicated below will be in the General Adult Class in the Main Building, Room 106 in-person and on Facebook Live. The other General Adult Class and College and Young Professionals will follow this schedule and curriculum but be facilitated by other teachers.