Trinity Harbor Church

The New Testament has a very high view of community. Practicing New Testament community requires more of an individual's time, energy, and love than what can be offered in a Sunday worship service

That's why Trinity Harbor considers Community Groups to be essential to the life of the church.

As Community Groups start up for the 2010-2011 academic year, we thought we would take the week to ask a couple questions. Why are Community Groups important? How should Community Groups function?

If we can't answer the questions of why we are doing something, then it probably isn't worth doing.

In Romans 12:1 Paul writes,

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. (ESV)

Notice that Paul acknowledges the plurality of believers in the Roman church ("bodies" - plural), but that he considers their act of worship to produce one product ("sacrifice" - singular). For Paul, each person in the church has a responsibility to pursue holiness, but God sees those pursuits as a unified offering. In other words, the quality of offering depends on the whole of all of the parts.

This is important for several reasons:

1. Christian culture today tends to measure holiness in individual terms, but here we see that God evaluates the sacrifice on corporate (the church body) terms.
2. If the quality of a church's sacrifice (their spiritual worship) depends on the overall holiness of everyone involved, then members of the church will be much more committed to seeing their brothers and sisters thrive in holiness.
3. Your sin is not a personal matter. Your sin compromises the quality of the sacrifice that is offered by the church as a whole. Hopefully, this encourages us in holiness. When we sin, we aren't just hurting ourselves. We are hurting everyone in the church who is laboring to make a holy sacrifice.

Community Groups provide a venue in which we can encourage and support one another in such a way that the sacrifice Trinity Harbor offers together is not only something that is acceptable to God, but something he actually delights in.