The Table Community Church (Belgrade)

Our apologies. Due to technical issues, there is no recording this week. Here is the description of the message:

This Sunday, we will be in Mark 4:21-25. Yes! Only four verses! But do not let the brevity fool you, as it is packed with meaning and instruction for us as followers of Jesus. I want you to think about one question as we prepare for Sunday: How do I know if I take Jesus seriously? Now…taking Jesus seriously does not mean we live with stoic posture or without joy and adventure (quite the opposite!). Still, how do we know if Jesus has an authoritative voice in our lives? We will explore this together on Sunday!

Last Sunday, we looked at the nature of discipleship. This Sunday, we'll explore the Kingdom and the word. Hopefully, we'll get lost in a parable about parables together. Then, look to Jesus to help us make sense of it all. Specifically, we'll explore Mark 4:1-20. Questions to consider throughout the week is:

• How do you respond to God when you don't understand something?

• What gets in the way of welcoming Jesus into your everyday life?

This Sunday, we will look at the nature of discipleship. Our text is a bit longer but filled with insight into what it means to follow Jesus well. One question to consider as we move towards Sunday: How might you respond if someone asked you to define the church in one sentence? To get a grip on what we will read, look at Mark 3:13-35.

In the Gospel of Mark, we find Jesus in conflict with the religious elites quite often. Last Sunday, we looked at Jesus’ teachings on feasting and fasting, which challenged the old traditions. This Sunday, we find one of the most controversial teachings of Jesus for his time: the nature of the Sabbath. It is equally controversial in our time but for different reasons. I look forward to discussing with you all the beauty of the Sabbath in the light of Jesus.

In Mark 1:40-2:1, we continue our journey through the gospel of Mark. It is always interesting to think about what Jesus could have done with his power but what he chose to do with it, and in Mark's gospel we see Jesus continually going to those who had been excluded from community, sick and isolated, or those just simply in need of his healing touch.

This Sunday, we look at Mark 1:14-39. In this passage, we hear Jesus’s first words in Mark’s gospel and how he chooses to launch his public ministry. It is filled with action but focuses on the power of Jesus’s words and deeds. We will explore what this text teaches us about who Jesus is and what it means to follow him.

In Person Service Canceled 1/14 and moved to Zoom.

Look for recording link soon.

On Christmas Eve we look at Luke 2:21-28- the story of Jesus, Simeon the Priest, and Anna the Prophetess. It’s a story of Jesus coming to two elderly and weary but faithful individuals. All of us, in some way, long to meet Jesus. This is true whether you have been following Jesus for some time or are stepping into questions about him - our desire for God doesn’t go away when we are saved; it intensifies. One question to sit with: If you zoomed out and looked at your daily routines, is there a desire for and seeking after Jesus anywhere in your calendar?

Advent - A Joyful Hope This week, we contemplate Jesus's birth and the incarnation, with Christmas Eve approaching. We'll center our time on Luke 2:1-21 and examine the richness of the God who became flesh.

Life Around the Table: Sharpen Your Spurs

The Bible tells us we have a responsibility to champion, to encourage, to embolden, to empower, and to loving prod one another on to love and good deeds. We are to call one another up to a high level of godliness and expression of who we are in Christ. Alone we will only go so far, but together, with others cheering us on, we can have the courage and strength to go much further. This Sunday we explore our responsibility to our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, and our fellow members of the human race.

Life Around the Table: Breaking Bread Together - The Table Fellowship

We continue our series called Life Around The Table by exploring the concept of table fellowship in the life and ministry of Jesus and in the early church. I think you will be surprised with how significant table fellowship is throughout Scripture. I also discuss a little bit about why we choose to do it the way we do it from a more cultural and missional perspective.

Life Around the Table: Prayer as a Way of Life

This week, we take a look at the core value of prayer. It is hard to turn the page of the Bible without running into someone praying. It is the default response for those following Jesus in this wild world. If you struggle to pray, get confused about how to pray, find yourself frustrated in praying, or want to know how to deepen prayer life with God, this message will be really relevant. More broadly, this is an area that we really hope to further develop in the life of our congregation.

Life Around the Table This week, we will look at our second core value as a church: attentiveness to the Holy Spirit. We believe that the Holy Spirit is God's personal and empowering presence. What does it mean to practice attentiveness to what God is up to in our midst, and how he is present with us in the everyday stuff of life?

Life Around the Table Last Sunday we began a series called Life Around The Table. We are exploring who we are and what we sense God doing in our midst and we might be able to join him. We covered our mission and vision statements. Our mission is simple and straight from Scripture: reconciling people to God and each other in Christ. This means that everything we do is for the sake of bringing people together around the good news of Jesus. We believe that if we are joining God in this way, we can expect to see lives, families, and relationships flourish because of the good news of Jesus.

This Sunday, we look at our first fore value: Being devoted to Jesus and his teachings. We are not a religion organized around a set of principles but rather a person. We believe that devotion to Jesus connects to the life for which we were created. Jesus himself says that his words give life and that when we abide and obey, our joy will be complete. This Sunday, we explore what it means to devote ourselves to Jesus and his teachings as a learning community.

Life Around the Table

This week we begin a brand new series called Life around the Table. We are taking a close look at who we are as church family. For the last few years, Our church has gone through several changes: We have moved spaces, joined two churches together, went through COVID, and a host of other things. In and through all of this, we believe that God has revealed to us certain things about our church that really define who we are and where we are going. This Sunday we take a look at our mission statement and talk about what it looks like to embody it as a church family.

Last week in our series, "The Story of God" we talked about the portion of the story where redemption through Israel is revealed, redemption is completed in Jesus, and redemption is proclaimed by the Church. As we continue in our series, we explore the proclamation of this redemption by the Church. Specifically, we talk about the portion of the story that we live in right here and right now (ordinary time). To do this we explore redemptive images of Jesus and The Church found in Scripture.

Our Series on the Story of God continues. We will look at how redemption was launched in and through Israel in the Old Testament and what in the world that has to do with you. Knowing how Israel fits into our own faith story is essential if we are to make sense of what God has been up to. We will find much encouragement by discovering the relationship between Israel, Jesus, and the Church.

The Story of God

We are continuing our series called the Story of God where we are looking at the four major chapters in which scripture could be divided: Creation, the Fall, Redemption, and Restoration.

This week will be taking a look at the Fall and exploring why things are the way they are in the world and what God is doing and has done to deal with it. It is incredibly important that Christians know how to talk about the reality and implications of sin, precisely because it's been so misused and abused as a term. We will talk about how to talk about sin and make sense of it in light of the broad story we find in Scripture.

The Story of God

This week we are looking at Genesis 2 and the image of God in humans. We hear 'image of God' quite a bit, but what do we actually mean when we say it and what does Scripture teach us about the significance of being created in God's image? We will dive into questions like this and more.

Series: The Story of God

This week, we're going to talk a little bit about how to best tell the story of Jesus to those around us.

(Begins with update from Iris and Rich Ickles)

Experiencing the Holy Spirit

Seeking God's Presence in the Wilderness

This week closes out our series on the Holy Spirit this Sunday. We will look at Exodus 33 and talk about what it looks like to seek God's presence in the middle of the wilderness. This has been a meaningful series, and we would love to hear from you if you've had any sort of experience with God that you would like to share with us!

Experiencing the Holy Spirit

Martin Kahler, a German theologian, once said, “Mission is the mother of all theology.” Theology, in the Christian imagination, is not merely studying about God. Rather, it is about experiencing God and intentionally pursuing him with our whole being. Thus, to experience God’s Spirit, we step into situations where we share the good news about Jesus. Both mission and evangelism have negative connotations in our culture, and for good reason in some cases. Still, if we recover a true and meaningful idea of what it means and looks like to share the good news, we will find ourselves experiencing the Spirit in ways we never thought possible. Particularly, this week’s teaching will discuss how experiencing the Spirit leads to boldness and boldness leads us to more experiences with the Spirit. Read Acts 3-4 to prepare for this week's teaching!

Experiencing the Holy Spirit

While Cody was away ministering at a youth adult conference, Fred Neth spoke on 'Opening Up to Jesus' Ministry of the Holy Spirit" from John 7:37-39. Fred highlights three stages of Jesus' Messianic invitation:

1. By honestly assessing our personal level of receptivity - "if anyone is thirsting..."
2. By submitting to Jesus to minister the Holy Spirit to us - "Come to me and drink..."
3. And, out of your deepest being floods of living water will be flowing."

This Sunday, Mark Archilla will be our guest speaker and he will be exploring some questions from our congregation regarding daily living with the Spirit. It will be a great time to come curious, eager, and with our own personal questions regarding how we relate day to day to the Holy Spirit.

Experiencing the Holy Spirit

Last Sunday, we talked about experiencing the Holy Spirit by looking at the inner life of the church. We experience the Holy Spirit as we open ourselves up and surrender to God those areas like bitterness, unforgiveness, the temptations to tear others down with words, anger, and greed. As we turn to Jesus, we find ourselves experiencing his presence in ways that lead to humility, patience, forgiveness, and honesty.

This Sunday, we will look at how we experience the Holy Spirit as we get to work in the church, building up our life together and witnessing in our community. The Holy Spirit is the breath of life into the body of Christ – which is the Church. We all have a part to play and people who experience the Holy Spirit are those who participate in the movement of the body! To prepare, you can read over 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 12:1-8. Ask yourself, “In what ways do I see the Holy Spirit use me in the life of the church?”

Experiencing the Holy Spirit

This Sunday, we will talk about how to cultivate and keep that unity in the midst of conflicting personalities, experiences, beliefs, etc. Scripture gives us a few important principles and practices that help us experience the Holy Spirit in community, and disunity keeps us from experiencing what God has for our church family.

Read through Ephesians 4 to get a grip on what we will cover.

Acts 2: 1-21

1. We narrow our view by assuming

2. We narrow our view by judging

3. We narrow our view by consuming

4. We narrow our view by pride

5. We narrow our view by stagnating

In this teaching we explore what the Scriptures have to say about hell and judgment, and what it has to say might surprise you. Often times we get more interested in the various details about the afterlife rather than making sense of what Jesus says in his own words. So, this is a brief teaching on the nature of hell and judgment according to Jesus.

One of the most neglected beliefs in the protestant and evangelical tradition is the ascension of Jesus. Yet, it is one of the most important because it marks beginning of the church's witness to the world about the story of Jesus. Further, if Jesus does not to send, the Spirit does not come. In exploring the ascension, we look at the priestly, royal, and prophetic work of Jesus and how those things continue in and through the life of the church.

Preface: The sounds is not of the best quality. 

Helpful Links: 

Matt Emerson - https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/christs-descent-dead/ 

Charles Hill - https://journal.rts.edu/article/he-descended-into-hell/ 

We are talking about what it looks like to confess and experience the power of the Resurrection. 

Only the Suffering God can Help. - Bonhoeffer

As N.T. Wright says, “You don’t have to be able to answer the question “Why?” before the cross can have this effect. Think about it. You don’t have to understand music theory or acoustics to be moved by a wonderful violin solo. You don’t have to understand cooking before you can enjoy a good meal. In the same way, you don’t have to have a theory about why the cross is so powerful before you can be moved and changed, before you can know yourself loved and forgiven, because if Jesus’s death.”

How does the suffering Jesus impact our own suffering in real and tangible ways? 

What is the reigning and guiding authority in our lives? Here, we explore a life arranged under Jesus the Christ. 

We are in a series on the Apostles’ Creed in a Post-Everything World. Our heat and hope is that the series can serve as a starting point for belief and practice as a church family. The last few weeks are online if you have missed out, and I encourage you to catch up if you can. Today, we are looking at the last few words of the first article, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” Our focus is on “Creator of Heaven and Earth.”

1.  Who is the Creator?

2. What is the Story about Heaven and Earth?

3. What does this have to do with you?

Last week, we looked at “I believe in God,” yet that statement alone tells us nothing about who this God is or what this God is like. We looked at Acts 17 as a starting point for making sense of the Creed within our own cultural climate: a very spiritual one. We clarified what we meant by “I believe in God.” The Creed’s first description of God is that he is the “Father Almighty.” The language describing God as Father is found throughout the Scripture and most emphatically in the ministry and words of Jesus himself. Yet, the word father evokes various sorts of emotions in our culture, from broken relationships to conversations on masculinity, fatherhood, and gender. The word power evokes emotion because of how often we abuse it in our world, how much we crave it, and how we have come to distrust those with power. In fact, one common belief in a post-everything world is a profound skepticism of power within institutions.

So, as we did last week, let’s explore the cultural tone and move into how believing in God the Father Almighty affects our perception of life with God. Indeed, even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as in fact there are many gods and many lords— 6 yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.” (1 Cor. 8:5-6 NRSVue).

What is the Apostles Creed?

• Historic summary of the Christian faith as preserved in the Scriptures. The Apostles’ Creed does not replace Scripture but points us back to them.
• An early resource for discipleship (used in catechism and confessed at baptism).
• An elevator speech of the story of God: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Total Renewal.

Why is the Apostles’ Creed important for us today?

• The lack of theological and biblical literacy in our context, and the need to know how to articulate the Christian faith in a trinitarian way.
• The need to challenge fundamentalism and revisionism. The Apostles’ Creed gives more flexibility than fundamentalists care to admit, while also challenging the revisionists with important theological boundaries.
• The reality of deconstruction and the Apostles Creed provide some basic building blocks for those reconstructing a theologically healthy sense of faith in Christ. Many who come through deconstruction come out the otherside without having reconstructed a well formulated theology of discipleship to Jesus; oftentimes, cynicism, lingering doubt and a different form of fundamentalism emerges when we do not reconstruct. As we will find, doubt is neither an intellectual (i.e. Cartesian project)  virtue nor a villain (fundamentalism). It should be engaged, not ignored.

Today, the goal is not to unpack the whole creed, but to focus on “I believe in God.” What I hope to do with you is provide a brief snapshot of the spiritual tone of our culture and press us towards the question, “What do you mean (and what does it mean) to say, “I believe in God.” We can no longer assume we all mean the same thing, and this is essential for faith and mission.

Our theme this year is "Come and see." We will filter our teachings and life together through this lens. 

In every Advent text, pay attention to the unexpectedness of God’s coming, it is unexpected in manner, in time, and in culture. Every Advent text includes people struggling with uncertainty and trying to piece it all together. What we have learned thus far is that there are often no easy answers and sometimes we are not given answers at all. We were told by Jesus that we will not know a lot of things. We were told by Jesus that although he is God who has come to overturn evil, injustice, sin, and death, that sometimes we will find ourselves in situations like John the Baptist, where we are called to endure without the answers we want. Today, we are asking, “How do I trust God while navigating uncertainty?” Our story and text today involve a collision between the Advent themes of unexpectedness, uncertainty, and responding to God with devotion when it makes no earthly sense.

As human beings, and especially Americans shaped by our societal values, we like certainty. We like our plans to be made and we have contingency plans in place if things do not go our way. We have our plans and we have plans for our plants should they not go through. Certainty and control are values by which we live and arrange our lives. We invest in retirement, we purchase health insurance for illness, and life insurance in case we die. These are not bad things, but they show the degree to which we will go to ensure stability. The Western european an dAmerican way of life is built upon being secure, significant, and satisfied.

Further, we have an aversion to commitment because we don't like to be bogged down or let down. You can make a purchase, wear or break the item, and get a full refund or exchange with no questions asked most times. We can drive a car for three days before buying, and we have commodified sex and relationships in teh same ways. We don’t want to be duped or let down or disrupted.

This is bad news for entering Advent because Advent is God’s way of being profoundly honest with us about how things work in the world, what he is up to, and what our role within it might look like if we join him. In this world, you will have trouble, according to Jesus. Even if you live your best life, you will face trouble. No matter what your social media shows, the life behind the screen isn't always what it seems. Walking with God requires trusting him and entrusting our lives into real ways from our relationships, resources, and way of living. The word trust sounds nice until we realize that the very word implies uncertainty and unexpectedness. So, what can we know that will help us entrust ourselves to God?

Advent is about looking forward, looking back, and looking now. During our first week, we looked forward to see that Jesus promises to return to evict evil, we looked back before the days of Jesus to see how God instructed his people to act while waiting for jesus, which was to be peacemakers; and we looked to what means now, which was to love God and our neighbors well. This week, we are given another angle for the past, present, and future.

Have you ever felt like you were doing everything right but for some reason felt invisible to God? You look at other people’s lives and it seems like God is mending, working, healing, and helping many others, but you feel overlooked or even deserted. You are out in the wilderness and feel a bit lost, which feels strange because you have been following Jesus or believing in God for some time.  If you resonate with this feeling, you’re in good company. John the Baptist, the cousin of Jesus, faced such a moment.

John leaps for joy for Jesus, lives in the wilderness to draw people out of the normative daily routines to point them to Jesus, and he even found Jesus to be so important that he set aside his own ministry and sent his disciples to follow Jesus. A whole life and ministry devoted to Jesus. The texts are silent about his joy after the womb. In fact he goes from leaping for joy to landing in jail, awaiting his death sentence, wondering if Jesus is the One who will save and if Jesus is coming.

The book of Psalms is considered the songbook of the Scriptures. Like songs and poems, they are intended to connect to our emotions and experiences. Sometimes the Psalms are filled with joy and celebration, other times they are filled with anger and grief. Still, other times they are filled with doubts and fear. Psalms are invitations to deal honestly with ourselves, our situations, and our hopes and fears with God in total openness.