Disciples Who Hear God's Voice

From the Pastor's Desk That’s the thing. We don’t know what the survey says till you fill it out! As you know, we are in a series at church right now called Make Disciples, but our call to make disciples is much bigger than a simple sermon series. This coming Sunday will be the final sermon in our series, but our mission to Make Disciples Who Hear God's Voice will not end.  Survey This survey is a chance to find out how the members of the church are doing in areas of discipleship that we’ve been focusing on since we began our new vision. Below is a link to the Annual survey that we talked about at the member meeting. Take the survey HERE Website We have updated the Wellspring website to help us stay focused on the vision. You'll find a brand new Missions page that tells you how to Know, Pray, Give, and Go to the various ministries we support and partner with. You'll find a page that captures our heart behind Discipleship and a page explaining   how to Belong at Wel...

From the Pastor's Desk If you were at the Sunday service, you know that the one thing all Christians should be eager to do is to practice the spiritual discipline of fasting.  The link to the sermon along with notes are all below, but there are a number of resources I wanted to share with you that help you understand the physical side of fasting. It's a topic I'm more and more interested in, but I practiced self-discipline by NOT just giving you an hour-long TED talk on the physical benefits of fasting.  Here are a few videos I've collected over the years that have gotten me excited to fast. These are not from a Christian perspective, and you'll see that some are just put together by YouTubers, but if you're taking on a fast, hopefully, you'll find these helpful. Remember, we fast for the Spiritual benefits, but God has designed us to ALSO get great physical benefits from this spiritual practice.  Videos about the physical side of fasting: What happens to yo...

From the Pastor's Desk For the past few weeks, we've talked about intimacy with God , and I've tried to give practical things we can do in our Christian lives to grow in intimacy. A few weeks ago, I said that one of the ways to grow in intimacy with God is actually to grow in vulnerability with one another.  When we do the hard work of being honest and letting others see into our lives, our honesty muscle grows, and our self-deception muscle shrinks . Our self-deception muscle is not something we develop intentionally. A lot of the time, we don't even know we have it, but this strange muscle I'm talking about is the culprit behind self-righteousness and that curious habit we have of being VERY aware of everyone else's faults and failures but refusing to even acknowledge our own.  Ironically, we don't develop that self-deception muscle because we have a high view of ourselves. We develop it because we are afraid to face how fickle, judgmental, selfish, and un...

From the Pastor's Desk On Sunday, we talked about intimacy with God. I said that one of the disciplines you can practice to grow in intimacy with God is actually the discipline of vulnerability with one another. It can be somewhat scary for other people to know all your issues, struggles, and so on. However, it's worth the work of being known because God has designed us to be in that kind of community.  We have several stories of community in action at this church, but one story is great proof that vulnerability with others brings greater closeness with God. The video below is the testimony of Travis and Sara Harkins. In the video, Travis mentions "discipline." He's referring to the church putting him on what we typically call church discipline, which is spelled out in Matt 18. If a person sins against another person, first, we are to confront one-on-one, hoping that the offending party will repent. If he or she does not repent, then we come back with two or three...