How do we grow in our love for others? We have to practice. We have to practice a lot. God gave us the immediate family unit to learn about relationships. The strong covenant of marriage is supposed to help us learn about his unconditional love for us. The process of raising children teaches us patience (hopefully) and helps us iron out some of our character issues while we instill in others good character. Paul urges the early church to only let people who have healthy home lives become leaders in the church because we need to understand these relationships before we start on others.
At Active Love, our primary way to work on the Grow It portion of our mission is through small groups – we are going to call them Real Groups. Real Life, Real People, Real God! Read our post about Grow It here. The primary goal of these groups is to “do life” with our fellow believers from the comfort of a living room or porch or a central location. By doing this we will form spiritual family bonds that will last. We know because when we lived far away from our immediate families, we were loved on and supported by our small group family. They babysat for us, we did ministry together, they brought us food when we had hospital stays, and were constants in our lives each week. We are still in contact with many people from small groups we have participated in as we moved about the country.
Does that mean we always agreed on everything and never had rough moments? No. People are messy, we all make mistakes. This is where the growing occurs. This is where we make a decision to work through something instead of turning away. This is where we learn how to love when (we feel) someone is being unlovable. This is training for how we can love the world!
We hope every one of our members will plug in. Our Real Group leaders will be the first level pastoral care. Our Real Groups will be little families inside our church where we will all grow in love and unity together!
