Community Guide

This week’s Community Guide is based on the Sunday morning teaching from our Race & Justice Event with Dr. Bryan Loritts. As your whole Community gathers (online or socially distanced), use the Community Guide below to give shape to your night together.

Begin by Practicing the Lord’s Supper Together (5 minutes)

Begin your night together by partaking of the bread and the cup together. Have each person bring their own Communion elements. To facilitate your time, you can either ask a member of your Community to come ready with a short prayer, liturgy, or scripture reading, or assign someone to read the liturgy we’ve provided below:

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we present ourselves to you.
In your kindness, you have loved us and rescued us.
You have saved us and called us your own.
You have adopted us into your family,
So that no man, woman, or child need be lonely.

At your table, we give our awareness and our presence
to you and to one another.
We share one loaf,
as one body,
in allegiance to one Lord. Amen.

Emotional Health and Life Check-in (10 minutes)

Give each member of your Community time to answer the following two questions in a minute or less:

• What is the strongest emotion you have noticed in yourself this week?
• What habits are you finding give you space to process your emotions right now?

Scripture Reading (5–7 minutes)

Assign one (or multiple) readers to read Ephesians 2:1–22 aloud for your Community. After reading, spend 30–60 seconds in silence.

Work through these Discussion Questions as a Community (30 minutes)

• In his teaching, Bryan said: “The multiethnic church is the most profound apologetic to the veracity of the gospel.” How could a multiethnic church impact our city differently than a homogenous church? What does a multiethnic church say about God’s nature that a homogenous church cannot?
• In his teaching, Bryan spoke of how the Gospel is both vertical and horizontal in nature. The Gospel is concerned with our relationship to God (vertical) and to our neighbor (horizontal). Often we tend to emphasize one of these dimensions over the other. Which dimension has been most represented in your church experience? Which are you most prone to emphasize?

Prayer (5 Minutes)

Spend a few minutes praying for Bridgetown Church. We believe that this is a watershed moment in our story, in which the Spirit of God is inviting us to become the diverse-yet-unified Community that Jesus died to create. Recognizing that this is slow work, pray that Bridgetown would grow to become a diverse expression of Kingdom life in our city.

Practice For The Week Ahead: Scripture Reflection (2 Minutes)

The Practice for this week is to read Ephesians 2 on your own. Begin by inviting the Spirit, read through the text slowly, and spend some time asking the Spirit how he wants to speak to you through this passage.