Family and Children
At The Gathering Church we believe that family is God’s idea, and it is a beautiful and necessary one, springing ultimately from the love and relationship that God has with himself among the members of the Trinity, and also between Christ and his bride, the Church. The notion of family as God has ordained it is massively under attack in our culture today, and we want to see our families shaped more and more by what the Word of God says; to joyfully champion God’s design for husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, and children. We also love and embrace children as gifts from God (Ps. 127:3-5; 128; Pro. 17:6). The Word of God always speaks of children as a blessing and never a curse and yet we live in a culture that often sees children as optional, a burden, a hindrance to flourishing, and ultimately as disposable. We reject that view of children entirely. Parents, especially fathers, bear responsibility to raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord (Eph. 6:1-4). As a church we desire to equip and encourage parents towards that end.
Children:
On Sunday mornings at The Gathering Church our service is age-integrated. We desire to see the entire church praying together, worshiping God together, and sitting under the preached Word together. As a matter of hospitality, we provide a nursery for children ages 5 and under during the sermon. The purpose of the nursery is to allow parents and adults to sit under the Word of God with minimal distractions and there is certainly no pressure for a family to put their child in the nursery; we leave this decision up to the discretion of parents.
Young Adults:
The discipleship plan of children is incomplete without the local church. When we come to Jesus, we gain mothers, brothers, and sisters a hundredfold in the church (Mt.19:29); we gain a family, for the church is the family of families (1Tim. 3:15). Our expectation is that the young adults at The Gathering Church would be integrated into the body life of the church. It is the expectation of all members of The Gathering Church that they would be involved in community groups and discipleship triads. We expect no less from the teenagers of our church – we desire every teenager in our church to be actively involved in a community group and a discipleship triad; we encourage families in the church to welcome in those who may not have a family of their own. The elders of the church believe that the best discipleship process for anyone in the church – whether teenager, widow, young mother, empty nester, etc., is to be an integral member of the local church (Eph. 4:15-16).
Men
“Be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.” 2 Timothy 2:1-2
“Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love.” 1 Corinthians 16:13-14
God’s call to men from Genesis was to lead. Since Adam’s fall, our hearts are inclined to shrink from and shirk this holy responsibility. Men’s neglect of this call to gladly give our lives away for the sake of others has devastated society. At The Gathering Church, we recognize the immense weight of influence that men have in our homes, our community, and our culture. We desire to champion men to be the servant leaders that God has called us to be.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is central to our Men’s Ministry. If our call is to teach men how to be men, then we must help men see the Son of Man. Jesus lived a perfect masculine life; he embodied true leadership and sacrifice. No program or principle can change our hearts. Only the Gospel can empower us to joyfully embrace the yoke of biblical masculinity. Only the God-Man can quicken us to gladly assume the responsibility to lead. Until a man’s heart is captivated by the beauty and glory of Jesus
Christ, he will continue to pursue sinful desires, leaving a wake of disappointment and disaster. The love of Christ must compel and constrain us.
From a new heart where Christ reigns, men will find the strength to do the hard work of leadership, making disciples who make disciples. Through the normal rhythms of sharing life together, specifically through our Sunday Service, Community Groups, and Triads, time and space is created for men to lead and spur others on to love and good deeds. Rather than inundate men with more meetings and programs, we desire to give space and margins for men to lead in their homes, their communities, their workplaces.
Men, shepherded by the elders, lead Community Groups and provide focused pastoral care. They encourage one another to be on mission in their unique spheres of influence. They raise up other men to lead future Community Groups. Triads create intimacy for brothers to shoot straight, confess sin, and lock arms in the daily grind and fight of faith. Sundays are filled with ample opportunities to lead and serve. Our annual Men’s Retreat celebrates the Gospel of Jesus Christ and encourages our men in the long obedience of advancing God’s Kingdom, on earth as it is in heaven.
The Gathering Church runs a Pastoral Intern program for those who express a unique desire to serve in future pastoral ministry. This intense year of head, heart and hand discipleship immerses interns in sound theological instruction, personal mentoring by our pastors, and tangible opportunities to ‘do the work of ministry.’
“Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.” 1 Corinthians 15:49
Women
“Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.’” Genesis 2:18
“Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior…They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.” Titus 2:3-5
The triune God made man in his image, male and female. We were created for community, for relationships that bless and complement each other. Woman first came from man, and since then, all men have come from women. But all is of God. In Christ, there is neither male nor female, all are one in Christ. And yet this in no way forfeits God’s unique intent and design for man and woman. They were created to complement one another and jointly reflect the glory of God.
God’s call for women is no easy task; it’s a high and holy calling of taking the low place, making much of Jesus, faithfully affirming and serving those in her midst. How can a woman embrace such a call and not suffer discouragement or resentment in a culture that insists upon the primacy of her autonomy and self-actualization? The Gospel of Jesus Christ!“ Let this attitude be in you which was also in Christ who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but
emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant…” Philippians 2:6-7
Women need daily encouragement in the Gospel of God’s grace, fresh reminders of Jesus Christ’s condescension, all for love, to please the Father and ransom His Bride. The Apostle Paul encourages older women in the church“to teach what is good, and so train the young women…” Paul goes on to say that the older women are to teach the younger women“to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands…”
The elders at The Gathering Church are convinced that these life-on-life opportunities happen best within the daily rhythms of life. At The Gathering, we intentionally emphasize sharing life together in the weekly context of Sunday Service, Community Groups, and Triads. These weekly habits create opportunities for relationships that foster care, encouragement, and accountability. The annual Women’s Retreat is a sweet break, a time of refreshment, reflecting on the beauty and glory of Jesus Christ, and finding strength to joyfully enter the daily pressures and duties of life.
Rather than The Gathering Church providing a myriad of events, it is the task of the pastors to encourage women to be involved in each other’s lives, “to equip the saints for the work of ministry.” Through relationships that are fostered and established by Community Groups and Triads, women spend time together, older women invest and impart wisdom to the younger women, they study God’s Word and pray for each other, they open their homes to each other and seek to show hospitality to those in need. As women commit to a ‘long obedience’ of speaking the truth in love to one another, the life of Christ is continually formed and fashioned into their lives and the body of Christ is built up.
Counseling
“Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.” – Eph. 4:15-16
Psychotherapist Gary Greenberg once referred to his practice as “the business of renting out love”. Put another way, when we lack loving, wise relationships, we don’t simply go on to live healthy, productive lives as lone wolves; if we can’t have input from a genuine community, outside perspective and insight must be sought elsewhere, at times even purchased.
This is not how things are supposed to be; we weren’t meant to try and make sense of the varied and sundry experiences of everyday life alone. Joy and sorrow, riches and poverty, success and failure, health and sickness, life and death…all of us at one point or another will encounter these things; it is not a question of if, but when. When a loved one betrays us, a business endeavor fails, we drank too much again, a mother miscarries, we respond angrily toward our children for the umpteenth time, we experience some personal moral failure, we don’t know what to do with our rebellious teenager, our emotions are all over the map because we lost a loved one to cancer; when life turns in unforeseen and undesirable directions we need more than a “don’t worry, I got this” mentality. We need more than just a “rent-a-friend”, and more than just someone to vent all of our un-nameable frustrations to.
We need words of counsel, candor, care, and all of these from one who we know loves us in spite of the not-so-lovely aspects of our character. We need to know that we can be forgiven by God, and that no matter what the current state of affairs may be there is hope for redemptive change. We need a community of faithful friends, friends whose words at times feel more like healing balm, and at others seem to burn more than heal, but are always spoken with healing intent (Proverbs 27:6, 17).
Christ’s Church is meant to be such a community.
Christ builds us, together, as a people, as a community, under the guidance of His word as it is proclaimed and taken to heart through the ministry of preaching and teaching. God’s intention is for the Church to be shaped and cleansed within the Church, and that includes taking one’s sorrows, woes, and inadequacies (the things we don’t normally want people to see, know, or give feedback about) and laying them before faithful friends who will then walk alongside us, in both critique and comfort. It’s
more than just having a few specialized people who are the go-to’s for counseling during hardships in life. It’s about creating and sustaining a culture within the community that together continually acknowledges its need for growth – but again – a culture which together seeks the maturity that we can only attain by living life together under the lordship of the Risen Christ.
The work of counseling, of speaking healing words and being a faithful, healing presence, is the work of the local Church. It is our prayer at TGC that our community life would be teeming with wise and compassionate counsel stemming from the lives of those who realize the depths to which we all have sunk, but that Christ’s grace and rule are deeper still.
Community Groups and Discipleship Triads
The Christian life cannot just be lived out on Sunday. Community Groups give us a context to be in each other’s lives on a consistent basis. They provide a place beyond the regular Sunday gathering where we can be transparent and grow in relationship with one another, and an opportunity to strategize about how to be a witness to Christ in our local communities.
We live in an individualistic culture that affects us to such a degree that we can feel “at home” with event-driven Christianity without any real connection with others. It is easy for us to “go to church”on Sunday, relax in a seat and receive what is placed before us, then leave and live a separate existence the rest of the week. But some things can easily be missed if we only attend the SundayService. We can begin to have a distorted view of what church is. Church is not an event, or a building, but a new community of saved sinners, called out to celebrate and display the excellencies of Jesus, who called us out of darkness and into his marvelous light (I Peter 2:9).
The way that we envision discipleship at The Gathering Church is not a highly structured system. Rather, we encourage and help members get connected with others that they can grow with and can meet with in groups of 3-4 weekly or bi-weekly for discipleship, nurture, and accountability. We encourage members to use their time together intentionally to do each other spiritual good, whether it’s reading Scripture together, studying a book, praying for one another or helping each other share the Good News of Jesus Christ.
Church Membership
The New Testament instructs us to live in such a way that seems to require our lives to be interconnected with other Christians. Certainly many of the New Testament’s commands can be broadly applied to a wider group of Christians, but some point to a unique fellowship within smaller groups of Christians.
“Be devoted to one another in brotherly love” (Romans 12:10)
“Live in harmony with one another” (Romans 12:16; 1 Peter 3:8)
“Serve one another in love” (Galatians 5:13; 1 Peter 4:10)
“Carry each others burdens” (Galatians 6:2)
“Encourage one another daily” (Hebrews 3:13)
Membership provides the structure for us to live together the way the New Testament teaches. Membership is a declaration that you belong to this body and that we belong to you. When we live our lives in such an interconnected way, loving and forgiving and protecting one another, growing and learning and worshiping together, it is a display to the watching world about what God is like.
We also believe that the New Testament teaches a congregational church government. A congregational polity means that the congregation has final authority in a local church. This includes appointing church leadership and the taking in and putting out of members. This authority that the congregation has is a weighty responsibility and works in unison with the leadership of the elders.