Several months ago thousands of fans flocked to Glendale, Arizona to witness one of the most famous sporting events in the world: the Super Bowl.  Millions more watched from home as the Philadelphia Eagles took the field against the Kansas City Chiefs.  In many ways, the local church can unfortunately resemble an NFL football game.  

 In his book Jesus Continued, pastor JD Greear notes:

“In every age, the church faces the danger of degrading itself from a movement to a place, from a conduit of God’s mighty, rushing wind to a sacred place where we seek serene, spiritual moments; from a rescue station to a spiritual country club. This is certainly true in our day. I’ve heard the average church described like a football game: twenty-two people in desperate need of rest surrounded by 22,000 in desperate need of exercise.”

This is not the vision or the expectation that Jesus had for his followers.  We read this in Luke 6…

“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you? Everyone who comes to me and hears my words and does them, I will show you what he is like: he is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. And when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house and could not shake it, because it had been well built. But the one who hears and does not do them is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. When the stream broke against it, immediately it fell, and the ruin of that house was great.”

Jesus’ desire for his followers is that they would live out a vibrant and Spirit-empowered Christian life (see Rom. 8:11). We were never meant to live life on the sidelines but fully in the game. At Port City Church, active faith is applied when we follow the way of Jesus: being with him, becoming like him, and then doing what he did.

So what does that look like…where do we begin?  You can have all the ambition in the world but without direction your ambition will never translate to action.  That is why at Port City we try to create simple pathways on the weekend and during the week to apply an active faith as a follower of Jesus.  We think about these pathways in two categories.

1. The Gathering

Every week we gather together as the local church.  This is not something new or novel.  We’re simply continuing in a tradition that the Bible laid out for followers of Jesus over two thousand years ago.  After Jesus rose from the dead and gave his final instructions (while on earth) to his disciples - we see this tiny group of disciples begin to grow into a movement.  This movement began to see organised groups (ekklesiae) meeting throughout the known world. 

In Acts we read…

And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favour with all the people.

It sounds strange to say it but in today’s Christian context it needs to be said - practising an active faith involves being involved weekly with a healthy gospel-centred local church.  Every week we gather together with God’s people to worship through song and preaching and to remind one another of the beauty and power of the gospel (Heb. 10:23-25).  We also create space each week in our gathering to apply the active faith that Christ commands.

We do this in four distinct ways: giving, praying, singing, & practising the Lord’s Supper.  

There are a multiplicity of ways that we can actively apply our faith but we believe that these four ways help guide our people to build their house (aka their life) on the solid foundation as Jesus instructed.  Every week we encourage our people to give financially in response to the truth that God has given us everything (see Deut. 10:14).  There is a prayer team each week available and ready to intercede for the prayer needs of Port City.  Our worship team leads us in singing the truths of the gospel over one another (Eph. 5:19).  And we tangibly remember the gospel by partaking of the elements: the bread = Christ’s body broken & the cup = Christ’s blood poured out for the forgiveness of sins (Luke 22:14-23).

As crucial as the weekly gathering is for the shaping of the Christian it is not the only means by which we practise an active faith, which is why we place a huge emphasis on Groups.

2. In Groups

At Port City, we strongly believe that discipleship happens in community. This means that we were designed to follow Jesus in the context of relationships because at its core the church is not a building or an institution - it is a group of people.  As such, the people of Port City gather regularly on Sundays but then scatter during the week to their respective communities where they meet in Groups.  Again, this is not a new or novel concept but rather the model we see laid out in the early church (see again Acts 2:46).

These groups are intentional gatherings of 10-15 people (on average) that meet together once a week in homes across the HRM for the purpose of friendship building, prayer, mutual support & encouragement, and application of the previous Sunday’s message.

Think about the Gathering and Groups like a university course that requires lab work (I know…for many of you that brought back some rough memories of chemistry 101).   The gathering and subsequently the sermon each week is similar to the lecture portion of the class.  We gather and hear the Bible taught to us.  But then we go to our Groups, which act like the lab portion of class.  We take the truths of the Bible that we learned at the Gathering and we dissect them, break them down, put them under the microscope if you will in order to apply them to our lives.  It’s where we grow in our understanding of how God’s Word applies directly to our lives so we can live out an active faith.

We realise, however, that life is crazy and schedules are always changing, that’s why Groups are structured as 8-10-week semesters. Every 8-10 weeks, we’ll take time to ReGroup. You can either choose to commit to another semester with your current Group or sign up for a different group if needed. The goal is that these groups meet the demands of life while continuing to help you follow Jesus with others. We encourage everyone who calls Port City home to be involved in one of our Groups.  Starting this week we will begin sign ups for our next semester of Groups, which will begin the week of April 23rd.  

As a church we believe that Jesus actively pursued us (Phil. 2:7-8).  And in response, we want to actively live out our faith.  We pray that we as a church would be made up of people who build their lives on the solid foundation of Jesus by not simply hearing his words…but doing his words.