Prairie Sky Church

This past Sunday our “Gathered Community” house church event focused on two pieces of Scripture: Isaiah 55:1-3 and John 1:35-50. Together these two Scriptures tell us some important things about the Christian practice of invitation.

The Isaiah Scripture shouts, “Ho, all who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy, and eat.” As this Scripture continues, we learn that the practice of inviting should be “open, safe, and satisfying.” In other words, no pressure and no ‘bait and switch.’ Simple, open, generous inviting is what we seek to practice at Prairie Sky Church.

In the Gospel of John, we are struck by how the author portrays Jesus’ process of gathering disciples, especially when this is contrasted with the other gospels. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we get a bare bones story of Jesus simply approaching people (without any apparent prior relationship or connection) and commanding, “Follow me.” The disciples respond with immediate, unquestioning obedience.

That’s Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In John, Jesus’ invitations arise naturally out of his prior relationships with people and their prior relationships with other people. In other words, Jesus practices networking! John the Baptist, Jesus’ relative, recommends Jesus to disciples whom he (John) has already gathered, and two of John’s disciples leave him and join up with Jesus! One of these (former) disciples of John the Baptist, Andrew, has a brother named Peter. Andrew goes and gets Peter, and Peter becomes a disciples. Jesus then finds Philip, who is from Andrew and Peter’s hometown and is presumably an aquaintance of theirs, and calls him. Philip then gets his friend Nathanael. Nathanael is skeptical about meeting this Jesus. Instead of arguing with his friend, Philip makes a simple, open invitation: “Come and see.”

The Bible gives us helpful instruction in the Christian practice of inviting. In the context of natural, everyday relationships we invite people in a safe and open way simply to “come and see,” to experience and judge for themselves what it means to follow Jesus.

This week Nicole, our girls, and I traveled to Richmond, VA for Church Planters’ Boot Camp. We gathered with 73 other church planters, pastors, and lay leadership to learn the skills and concepts behind successful church planting. The “boot camp” speaks to the intensity and the discipline of the training, which matches the intensity and discipline of the work of planting a church.

It will take some time for us to process and put into practice what we’ve been learning, but we can say that it’s been very helpful. Thanks to the Atkins family, sister of one of our Prairie Sky people, for looking after our girls while Nicole and I were at the training. Church planting does not happen without generosity of many kinds! We are so grateful.

This past Sunday afternoon, our Prairie Sky Church house church event focused on Scripture from Isaiah 43:15-21 We talked about how just as in Isaiah’s day, God is “about to do a new thing” among us. We prayed that God might give us the ability to–in the words of Scripture–”perceive it.”

We talked about possibilities for a new meeting space to accomodate our growing faith community. We also talked about plans for upcoming community events. We will be hosting a family picnic and games event Sunday afternoon, April 27. We will also have a booth at the Fishers Farmers’ Market in June.

We prayed for God’s presence and the Holy Spirit’s guidance as we participate in this “new thing” God is doing among us.

This past Sunday, our house church event focused on Scripture from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: Matthew 5:14-16. This text from the Bible gave our spiritual ancestors, the Pilgrims of Mayflower and Plymouth Rock fame, the vision for their new faith community founded in the wilderness of the New World. The vision was of a “city built on a hill.” The image conveys the intention of the Pilgrims to create a community that would be both a blessing to and an example for the wider world. Wow! That’s chutzpah!

The Pilgrims had grand visions for their mission. Reality turned out to be a bit different. The Pilgrims faced many obstactes, disappointments, and adversities during their journey to America. They lost one of their ships and a large part of their group along the way. Their voyage was delayed so that they arrived at Plymouth Rock in December 1620 to face a bitter winter during which half of the small group that actually made it to America survived. They didn’t even manage to arrive at their intended destination–the Hudson River–instead they landed on Cape Cod before making their way to Plymouth.

Later, William Bradford, pastor to this tiny, fragile faith community would write,

But here I cannot stay and make a pause and stand half amazed at this poor people’s present condition. . . . They had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or towns to repair to, to seek for succor.

What astonished Bradford was not that half of the Pilgrims would perish that first winter, but that half of them would survive.

What could now sustain them but the Spirit of God and His Grace? May not and ought the children of these fathers rightly say: ‘Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice and looked on their adversity.’

Everyone comes from somewhere. One of the first questions I get when I’m introducing myself to people in Fishers is, Where are you from? Or, when they find out I’m a church planter, some form of What denomination? This question is a way of asking Spiritually, where are you from?

The story of the Pilgrims is important to Prairie Sky Church because it gives an important part of the answer to Spiritually, where are you from? We are tied to the story of the Pilgrims at least two ways: 1) Nicole is a literal descendant of the Mayflower Pilgrims, and 2) as a United Church of Christ community, Prairie Sky Church is a spiritual descendant of the Pilgrims, who formed the Congregationalist Church, which became in 1957 the United Church of Christ.

As a new church start, we identify with and take strength from the earliest chapters of the Pilgrim story. Many of us are newcomers to Fishers and have our own stories of landing in a “new world” and struggling to make a life for ourselves and our families without the support of friends and relatives nearby.

We also took away from our conversation a key word for defining our spirituality: Simplicity. When you have a vision for being a “city on a hill” in a “new world” that presents obstacles, challenges, adversity, and opportunities, you need to pare down the clutter of your life to the bare necessities. As pastor Craig Parker of Bridgeway Community Church (Fishers, IN) put it in a sermon this past Sunday morning, “Jesus plus nothing equals everything.” Like our Pilgrim forefathers and foremothers, it is our desire to keep our hearts, minds, and faith community focused with great humility and simplicity on our Savior, Jesus. In doing so, we trust that the light of Jesus will shine through our words and actions and that people will respond to that light by praising God with their lives. Is that chutzpah? Maybe. But it’s all for Jesus.

For more reading on the triumphs, trials, and failures of the Pilgrims, see Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War.