Monday, September 28, 2009

Yesterday at Church

It was cool to see God at work in his church yesterday.  My family and I made our way up to a poor colonia in Guadalajara called Nueva Santa Maria to be with one of the house churches that lives and meets there.  When we arrived, Jose Luis had chairs and up-side-down buckets set around in a circle in area outside the door of his small house.  After about 15 or 20 minutes, Jose Luis welcomed about 23 of us (at least half not-yet Christians) and explained that we had gathered to praise God in song, read and discuss scripture, encourage one another and remember Jesus around the table—which we did for the next couple of hours.  Later we walked to the corner for roasted chickens and continued the feast until late afternoon. 

I especially liked how the group discussed God’s Word yesterday.  After a prayer recognizing our common need and desire to hear a living word from God, we began to read the text from Genesis 6, 7 & 8—a story that had been chosen beforehand.  Then Liliana retold the same story on a level that helped the kids to understand and be drawn into the story—so cool to see the children and adults alike really engaging the Bible.  Then, for the next 30 or 45 minutes, while the children continued to draw pictures about their ideas from the story, the adults engaged in a conversation about God’s sadness concerning the sin and violence in his world, God’s plan to make everything clean and new again and the possibility that we humans can join God in this plan.  I was blessed to see God working among us. 

Posted via email from The Schroeder's Posterous

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