Communion & Welcoming The Spirit

Begin your night by taking communion together, whether a full meal together or some version of the bread and the cup. To facilitate your time, have someone read the liturgy we’ve provided below and spend a moment in silence before continuing:

Jesus, as we eat and drink together, would you help us to remember your deep, overflowing love for each one of us. Would you help us model this love to one another and to the world around us.

Holy Spirit, we welcome you to slow us down in this moment, that we might be present to you and to those around us. Would you fill tonight’s conversation with hope, reminding us of your goodness.

Father, we thank you for everything you have brought our Community through over this last year. Would you guide us through this next year as we grow more into the people you dreamt up from the beginning.

You are good and what you do is good. Thank you for who you are. Amen.

Read This Overview

Every year, Bridgetown Communities are invited to set aside some intentional time during our Vision Series to look at the year ahead and discern together where it is that the Spirit is leading. Because of Covid, last year’s Vision Series was collapsed into a mostly practical conversation about how your Community will make it through the fall and winter. In fact, much of the last year and half was about practically staying safe and abiding by government recommendations, while working through various Community Guides that required creativity, vulnerability, and hard decisions. Assuming that safety and practical conversations are still incredibly important, with updates like an accessible vaccine, we believe that this is the time to return to our old rhythm of vision-casting and recommitting to one another.

Do This Tonight

Instead of asking really practical questions tonight, we want to stretch the atrophied muscles of hope and celebration. We will get to the commitments part, but many of us need a reminder and refresher on why we’re committing before we’re ready to talk about what we’re committing to.

The Vision Series practice for tonight is simply to spend some time working through a few questions together. The hope is that these questions will help remind everyone what they love about their Community and to dream together about what God may have for you all this next year. Talk through each of the following questions, with the most time spent on the last one. It could be helpful to have someone to keep track of the answers to the final question.

  • What did you love about our Community before Covid? (Assuming your Community existed before Covid.)
  • What did God do for you or our Community during Covid?
  • What do we want to see God do in the year ahead? (If you want to, you are more than welcome to do listening prayer for this question.)

Do This Before Next Week

There is so much that we are hoping for and sensing the Spirit saying for our Community this next season. And hopefully the process of dreaming has awakened affection in us for one another. But dreaming and hoping alone doesn’t mean these things will just happen. It also requires commitment. To use next week as effectively we can, we would like everyone to look over the Bridgetown Community Commitments this week.

Speaking of next week, after you review the Commitments again together, we want you to do something to celebrate this last year as we recommit to each other for whatever God has next. This could be going out for dinner, having a game night, planning an outing, or doing something equally fun and celebratory together. So, spend the rest of your night right now planning what next week could look like.