The Beautiful Community (Part 1)
The Beautiful Community • Sermon • Submitted
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· 5 viewsThis is part 1 of a Biblical Theology on community for children ages 3 - 12. The lesson is a general framework and is to be modified for the intended audiences.
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Part 1: Made for Community & Disrupted Community
Part 1: Made for Community & Disrupted Community
A. Made for Community
How many of you all have ever heard of the word “community”?
What is a community? (for small children, answer with something like, “a community is a big word to mean people who come together for something) (For older kids, can say something like “the word community sounds like two word put together that can help us understand what the word means: “common” and “unity.”
What are things that bring people together? Answers may include things like: Family…School…sport teams (playing or watching!)… activities…
What kinds of things do you like to get together with people for? (family barbecues, playing sports on a team, joining a club, friendships,
Why do we like to come together with other people, especially people who like what we like? Give time for answers and then say: “As believers in the Bible, we believe that we do not like to be alone and would rather be with other people is because that is the way that God designed us. The Bible is a record of what God has said about himself and his plans for us that have been recorded in a book . The Bible teaches that in the beginning, God made people to be a community, a common unity of worshipers of God who love God and were all in charge of the world and looked after each other.”
Genesis 1:27-28 says,
“So God created man in his own image,
In the image of God he created him;
Male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
God created human beings to be a people who work together and live together in harmony. That didn’t mean that he made us all the same, though. When he made us male and female, God made us all different so that all of humanity together could reflect just how amazing God is. God made us to be a people, he gave us a place and he gave us his presence.
We were created as a community who came together to worship and serve God by loving each other and the world that God made. It was a paradise!
A lot of can probably think of our perfect communities and how they do the magical thing of bringing together people of all different backgrounds and experiences and from different places in the world, be it families, cities, states or nations, together to do something together. In fact, communities usually start when we can look at someone as say, “you too? You also like Star Wars? You’re also a chess player? You also like to color holding 10 crayons at the same time?”
ACTIVITY:
- Make a list of all the “communities” that you belong to. (For smaller children this can be done verbally. Older children can do this as a whole group or in several small groups depending on the amount of children present. They can do this sharing with each other verbally, and then share with the group as a whole OR they can write down all the “communities” they belong to and then share them with the group).
A Church is a community of people who come together because of Jesus and what he did to save people from sin. Listen to this short story and think about how important people are in the church community.
Read “The Church is built with living stones” from The Ology, pg. 183.
The Crossing (PCA) is part of the Church that Jesus is building. We are a part of the community of the people of God. So even here, we are a church outside
B. Community Disrupted
- Has anybody ever been part of a community that they stopped liking? Maybe you switched friends? You changed teams, you quit a club, etc… what kinds of things make some “communities” bad? ( mean people, bullies, bad experiences, did not meet requirements, etc….)
**One of the things that we start to learn is that in every community, there is something wrong that still can make us uneasy and cause us to be sad and even mad. To keep it simple, our communities are broken. Sometimes its human selfishness. Sometimes its people lying. Sometimes its us. Sometimes things just change and the community goes away. Something is broken in communities that doesn’t let them be perfect… at least not yet.
What’s wrong with our communities is something that the Bible calls, “sin.” Sin is selfishness. Sin is coming together to do the wrong things that hurt people (like bullies or gangs). Sin is using other people make us feel good while making them feel bad. Sin treating people like they are not special in God’s eyes. Sin is trying to be communities that do not worship God. Sin is loving ourselves more than God and people, the original way it was supposed to be. Sin is falling short (Romans 3:23).
That’s why these communities all will ultimately fail: because they are broken by sin. They have a disease called sin that doesn’t let them be perfect.
But God wants a community of people. We call the community of his people the Church. The Church, not the building, is a community of people who gather together to worship and serve Jesus and serve others in his name. In our next lesson, we are going to learn about the kind of community that God is making for himself and that we can all be a part of.