G.L.O.W.

 In November of last year a group of CityWellers began meeting weekly for the purpose of coming to a succinct articulation of who we believe Jesus is calling us to be as a church, and to tie that articulation to specific and concrete practices that will become our way of life together. This group is called our Formation Team, as they are working to form our communal rhythms and practices that we hope will reinforce our identity as the church. Our driving question has been: What are the ways of Jesus that will form our way of life?

More than ever we are convinced that we are called to so much more than just believing the right things about Jesus; we are invited to actually know Him and to allow Him to redefine every aspect of our lives. This is about receiving the ways of Jesus as our way of life… in our families, in our personal ambitions, in our work, in our encounters with every person that crosses our path, in the ways we love our neighbors and serve our city, in the ways we use and give away our money, in the ways we share life with each other and learn to live joyfully, in the ways we hold onto hope together in the midst of our suffering, and in the ways we structure our schedules so as to make room in life to be with our Lord so that we might be transformed by Him to be the people he created and redeemed us to be, that we might actually taste the abundant life Jesus came to give and become partners with God in pouring that abundance into every part of our lives and our communities! Now that is an awesome calling (and run-on sentence)!

With all of this in mind, the Formation Team adopted a framework that we hope will capture the vision God is giving us in a broad enough way to always call us forward, but in a specific enough way to help us order our lives around concrete practices that all of us can integrate into our daily lives, both together and individually. Our hope was to come up with a simple and memorable way for The CityWell to express what we are about… how the ways of Jesus are becoming our way of life.

So here it is… receiving the ways of Jesus as our way of life means The CityWell becoming a people who G.L.O.W. We will Gather, Listen, Offer and Welcome. Each of these elements of our life together is a reflection of Jesus, and each is GOOD NEWS!

Gather: The Good News is that we have been given a beautiful, communal identity! 1 Peter 2:9-10 says: But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. You could say the grand narrative of the Bible is a story about God forming a people - giving us an identity founded upon our relationship to God through Jesus and our relationships to one another. This Good News speaks to the heart of every person’s longing for connection, community, embrace, acceptance and belonging!

For The CityWell, gathering has three concrete forms, Wells, Huddles, and Worship. Each of these serves unique purposes that all contribute toward the goal of our becoming a family and being formed as God’s people through deep relationships, an intentional discipleship process and passionate worship.

Listen: The Good News is that we have a God who actually speaks to us, and a God who actually listens to us! So we are seeking to become a people who develop habits of listening to our Lord’s voice in the Scriptures, through Prayer, through attentiveness to the Holy Spirit, and in listening to one another. Along with this, we long to be a people who love others and our city well enough to listen to them. Listening will require God to produce in us the fruit of patience, humility and gentleness.

Offer: The Good News is that we have a God who offers Himself fully to us – holding nothing back! In response we seek to be a people who offer ourselves to God, and likewise offer ourselves to one another. However, offering is not only an internal affair as we seek to imitate Jesus in offering ourselves to neighbors, strangers and even enemies. Check out Romans 12 for a biblical picture of this threefold offering.

Welcome: The Good News is that God unconditionally welcomes us! In Romans 15:17, we are exhorted: welcome one another as Christ welcomed you. So, we intent to become a community that welcomes E-VER-Y-ONE!

No exceptions.

This is about becoming a people whose corporate and individual lives are marked by extravagant hospitality, who invite others into our community and into our experience of God with the hope that others may come to see God’s heart for them through us.

This is what we mean by G.L.O.W. We are not talking about any exceptional luminosity in ourselves, but rather a way of life determined by communal commitments to rhythms of Gathering, Listening, Offering and Welcoming.

This way of life is both a response to and a picture of the Gospel of Jesus, and I am convinced that the more we live into this, the more we will come to know God’s love for us, the more we will become like Jesus, the more we will have impact as Jesus’ partners and friends in our community, and the more we will experience (and share) the abundant life Jesus gives. Please join us in praying that The CityWell will, indeed, become a people who G.L.O.W!