Ekklesia

Hi everyone!

Paul and Kim Johnson here.  This message is being sent out to several people including those on our Thursday Night Dinner email list for our neighborhood.  Hopefully by now you’ve seen our heart as well as our church’s heart of being committed to making a difference in our community (not only our community as a whole in the San Tan Valley and Gilbert, but in our neighborhoods as well).  That’s one of the reasons we as a couple started the dinners at our house on Thursdays so we can all get to know each other on a personal level and build a strong community of people.

In an effort to do more of this kind of thing, our church is looking for ways to give back to the community and I thought thing we could do is to get a group of people together to help in our neighborhood.

So a week from this Sunday, on the 27th starting at 8am, several of us from our church are coming to start from one end of the neighborhood (starting with the mailboxes) and pulling weeds, helping with yard-work or whatever else we can help with.  There are several bank owned houses but we want to be able to help at each of our houses if we can.  Obviously that depends on how many volunteers we can get.  The more we have, the more we can accomplish.

I also realize, being on a Sunday morning that many people won’t be able to or want to help out and that’s OK!  If you decide you want to help us and be a part of this project, let us know.  We’re also looking for materials (wheel barrows, weed tools, etc.)- so if  you can help by lending us something that could help we would love that.

So we’ll start at 8am and finish when we finish but trying to be done by noon with a BBQ at our house (337 E. Leslie Ave.) with seating in the garage and inside.  We’ll also have a tent set up and plenty of water and Gater-Aid to keep cool since it’s probably gonna be a hot one!

So please let us know A: if you can and want to help, B: can’t help but have something you can lend us, C: have something that you could use help with (Brent, our resident handyman will be there) or know someone we can help on the block.  Feel free to invite others to help out!  We’re waiting to hear from the nearby Home Depot to see if they can donate garbage bags and I plan on contacting the Association to see if they can help in any way.

Please let me know your thoughts and comments or questions!  Sorry for the long post!

Paul and Kim

This month we are going to serve and build community as a church. Here are some things going on with Ekklesia Communities this month:

Sunday, June 6th: Ekklesia Communities is helping LifeQuest Church by providing worship (Paul).  Ekklesia is encouraged to come and support/ be available for encouragement and fellowship or look for ways to be intentional and impacting in your own community/neighborhood. LifeQuest (http://www.lifequestchurch.org/) is currently meeting at Bolders in Tempe and their service church service starts at 9:30am. We will not be meeting Sunday, June 6th at Life Community Church at our regular time.

Sunday, June 13th: Ekklesia Communities will joining our fellow Acts29 Church, Missio Dei Communities in Tempe ( http://www.missiodeicommunities.com/). We share a similar vision and heart and want to see how we can partner together more to impact our city and spread the gospel.

Sunday, June 20th: Ekklesia Communities is helping LifeQuest Church by providing teaching/message by Pastor Paul Johnson.  Ekklesia Communities is encouraged to come and support Paul and LifeQuest as they move into a new location of YMCA in Chandler.

Sunday, June 27th: Ekklesia Communities Service Project in Queen Creek.  Coordinating the Johnson’s neighbors and Ekklesia Communities as we host a service project to help serve Paul’s neighborhood.  As a body, we are going around from one end of the block to the other picking weeds, offering help to those who would like assistance with various projects, yard work, chores, etc. We will begin in the morning around 8am (come when you can) and ending at our house at noon with BBQ. If you have them, bring tools and supplies to help with the cleanup. Also, bring others who want to serve their community and spread the love.

Since we “went public” w ith Ekklesia in January, we have seen God move in more ways and allowed us to impact more lives than we could have imagined.  We started off just a few of us in the planning stages and now we have several community groups meeting at different times in the Gilbert and Queen Creek area.  We also outgrew Steve and Christine’s living-room for our bi-weekly Celebration Gathering, so we were blessed to find a church in downtown Gilbert who graciously, and generously offered us their facility for such a small expense! 

We had our first gathering this past Sunday (June 28th) at Life Community Church on Gilbert Road just north of Joe’s Real BBQ (which I am totally stoked about being so close to!).  It was a blast!  We prayed together, sang songs of praise to our King, shared what He has been doing in our lives and in our home/community groups, and laughed and cried together.  Janine taught the kids the Creation account in their class and my daughter Katie ran to me afterwords singing the new song she learned.  I’ve never seen her so excited after a kid’s church class!  Steve brought us an encouraging lesson from Genesis chapter 2 as we continued the series “His Story” that yeilded great discussion!   

Then it was off to the Valero’s  to hand our invitations to their neighbors to invite them to a neighborhood chili cook-off in the community park by their house on Friday, July 3rd at 6pm!  We met some wonderful people and look forward to getting to know them better.  Come out and have some great food and time together with us!

God is so good, and I am excited to see what treasured He has in store for us around the corner!

Title: Celebration Gathering – His Story
Location: Life Community Church
Description: Continue our story into His Story as we transition from Creation to Rebellion. Join us as we walk the the Good News of the King and His Kindom
Start Time: 14:42
Date: 2009-06-28
End Time: 16:00

Title: Jesus’ Mission to Return
Location: Campus Ambassadors (ASU Poly)
Description: Jesus will come one day to restore His Kingdom. What does that mean for us? Come find out this beautiful story of how he will make all things new.
Start Time: 8:30pm
Date: 04-15-2009

Did you know that the Gospel is bigger than just your salvation? The Gospel is the Good News about a King and your salvation portion of ‘His Story’. We need to understand this story because it has implications for our lives. Come join us as we dive into the wonderful story of the Gospel. By the end of this series, we should have confidence in what the Gospel is, the Good News, and be able to share it with others in a meaningful way. This new series kicks off our Celebration Gathering starting Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at 2:42PM (Acts 2:42) at our temporary location, the Valero’s.

Click here for a map or call 602.741.5726 for directions.

Today, the American church is shrinking at an alarming rate. America is the 3rd largest mission field, behind China and India. Is Sunday morning enough? Have we lost some of the meaning of the word ‘church’? If our church was removed from our city, what would the city lose? What happens if we worked as a community of people and demonstrated the love of Jesus in our city? What happens if we lived our lives like Jesus and adopted His mission for our own life?

Come join us for an 8 week series on ‘Gospel Communities’. Learn more about missional living and what kind of impact the church had if we presented the gospel as a community. Come join us for an informal discussion as we challenge each other more to look like Jesus. Food will be provided.

WHEN: Alternating Fridays from 6:00PM – 8:00PM
WHERE: 1905 S. Pheasant Dr., Gilbert, AZ 85295

Tangible Kingdom is one of the books we will be going over. We’d love to have you come and join us as we challenge each other for the Kingdom of God.

Title: Jesus’ Mission to the Disciples
Location: Campus Ambassadors (ASU Poly)
Description: What did Jesus want the disciples to know before he left? What does it mean to be a disciple and what is important to God? We will answer some of these questions as we go threw the Upper Room Discourse (John 13-17).
Start Time: 8:30pm
Date: 03-18-2009

Title: The Big Picture – The Gospel
Location: the Rock Eternal Church (Queen Creek)
Description: Steve will be teaching on the Big Picture of the Gospel.
Start Time: 9:00am & 10:45am
Date: 2009-02-15
Sermon: Listen

Unlike any other time in our human existence, we have so much information right at our finger tips because of technology.  In the Christian culture you can read magazines, forums, blogs online, watch sermons, classes, inspirational videos, and communicate with other Christians around the world.  We have become consumers of knowledge. So here’s the next question.  Why do people feel need to go to church on Sundays?

I know why I’m involved with my church, but why are you?  I know many people who attend multiple churches on Sunday and throughout the week.  The go to their ‘church home’ in the morning.  Next the go to another church offering to ‘get fed’.  Then throughout the week they listen to sermons and participate in various forums online.  Why do these people attend on a Sunday? To get fed?  Are they using this knowledge? You can get fed by some of the best preachers in the world without leaving the bedside.  Plus we could pause them to get a bit to eat and never miss a word.  We could rewind a portion of message if we didn’t quite understand what the pastor was saying.  We could select a different sermon if we didn’t like the current one.  We could do other tasks to help out our week while we listen to the sermon on our ipod.  The combinations are endless.  So why attend Sunday service?  Do we have too?

I want to purpose that church is more than a Sunday morning experience.  The greek word for church is ekklesia.  Ekklesia means an assembly of God’s people.  What if church is not a building you go to and sit, but an active body of people (1 Cor. 12:27).  Imagine if the church pulled together and used their gifts for the common good, hung out together, devoted to the teaching of the apostles and helping those in need (Acts 2:42-45, 4:32-33;1 Cor. 12:9).  Imagine a place where a body of believers were working together to carry out the mission of Jesus and resembled His characteristics.  Where would those people meet?

I believe the church is bigger than where you sit on a Sunday and how many people attend.  I believe the church as a active body of people impacting where they live for the Kingdom.  I believe that we can be inspired by others online as we engage our culture.  But we need to be an intimate community of people in order to have impact.  We need to use the resources that God has given us for His glory (Matt. 25:14-30).  We need to be the church.