February 2017 Newsletter: What is Faith?

At Renew, we’ve been looking at the question of faith. What is it? Do you ever look around at your surroundings and wonder what has happened to faith in our culture?

Let’s look at it in a new way, and by new I mean old.

The book of Hebrews was written to a group of people not too different than us. They were living under the power of Rome (a superpower like the USA) and practicing the Jewish religion (Judaism). They believe God communicated through the Torah (first 5 books of the Bible) and that these laws should be strictly followed. Think about things like the Sabbath. Exodus says you should work six days and rest the seventh. If you don’t, you should be put to death. Whoa!

This was the popular religion of the day. Don’t you think people in our culture today look at the church and probably think it’s nothing but following a bunch of rules like this, too (minus the death part)?

But the Christian church was now a thing. Jesus and the disciples had been spreading this “new religion.” Really it wasn’t a new religion, it was just a new way of looking at religion. The Jewish religion believes in God, but Jesus was God’s way of showing us that belief is more like a relationship than it is about a bunch of laws/rules.

But the problem is you couldn’t just sign up for Christianity like you can today. New converts were being thrown in jail and even tortured. Kinda puts a damper on following this new perspective of religion, doesn’t it?

January 2017 Newsletter: Healthy Faith in the New Year

Happy New Year!

Don’t you love this time of year? Everyone is always talking about resolutions, goals and becoming better people. So let’s follow suit and think about growth…in our faith.

We could say that if we are growing, we are also healthy. For example, if your body is being strengthened at the gym (it’s growing), it’s doing so because you are putting in the work of exercising (which is healthy). The opposite of growing then (we could call that being idle), equals something unhealthy. Hang on to that analogy.

So where does growth happen in our faith? How do we have healthy faith? Let’s think about this through the concept of friendship.

Being a part of the church means…

We do these outreach nights every month or so where the idea is to help you think about how & why the church isn’t weird. Our hope is that maybe some people who think the church is a weird place might come to find that it can actually be quite normal.

Truth is, a lot of people probably think the church is this weird place.