All Christians are Sheep and Shepherds

The elders have become increasingly convinced that while God has blessed us enormously with a great warmth of fellowship and hospitality during our first 8 years as a church, we have also grown to a point where unless we give more organization and structure to our fellowship and hospitality, we will not be able to keep up. And this is a good problem to have. We want to cultivate a growing community culture that shares responsibility for one another and takes that seriously. It’s not as though the elders are the only shepherds and everyone else is sheep. The Bible sometimes speaks that way, but it also calls us all to bear one another’s burdens, to love one another, to care for one another. In some sense, we are all called in various ways to shepherd one another, to watch out for one another. And we are all sheep under Jesus our Good Shepherd, the Chief Shepherd. While the elders are committed to remaining active in pastoral care, we want to see you, our people, growing in confidence and joy in the Lord such that you are discipling one another, counseling one another, teaching one another, and sharing the gospel more in your neighborhoods and wherever the Lord takes you. In so many ways, this table means all of these things already. At this table, we serve one another, we feed one another like shepherds. Here at this table we are both undershepherds and sheep. We are fed by each other, and we feed one another. Here we enact what our baptisms mean, that we do not belong to ourselves, but rather to our faithful Savior Jesus Christ and to His body, the Church. Our membership vows also make this explicit: we have sworn loyalty and love to one another, and this means our highest priority is to see Christ formed in each other. And so we want to be intentional about this: planning to love one another, eating together, fellowshipping together, praying together, and supporting one another as we seek to love the hurting and lost in our lives. So come eat, drink, and rejoice. You belong to Jesus, and therefore you belong to one another.