God reveals himself in many paradoxes. He is just and merciful. Jesus said that to find your life you must lose it, to be the first you be last…and there are many more.

God is reliable (many Bible translations use the word “steadfast”)…

…and at the same time an agent of profound change and re-creation (we just celebrated the greatest example of this on Resurrection Sunday!)

This reliable/recreative paradox is at work in our church – right – now. It’s pretty exciting to think about, really! It’s working like this: God is recreating the structure of the church, transforming it from a “center-out” model where the community is defined by what happens in the Auditorium on the weekends, to a “network” model, where the weekly meeting in the Auditorium serves a network of smaller groups (E-Groups). This is pretty radical in some ways, like a volcanic shift, it’s a RE-creative process, changing many of the things we assumed were stable into brand new configurations.

But at the same time, God’s reliability sits beneath all this change. In many ways, it’s nothing new at all. He is not asking anything of us that he hasn’t been asking of his people from the beginning of time: To prioritize our relationship with him, and with one another. From the Garden of Eden, through the Covenants with Noah, Abraham and Moses, and finally to the ultimate re-creative event in the universe, the death and resurrection of Christ, the goal has always been the same: relationships.

E-groups are built upon God’s timeless goals. They exist to establish and grow relationships with one another (“koinonia”) and with God (Transcendence). We do this by EXTENDING the teaching from Sunday mornings into a weekly gathering where we discuss, explore and apply what was taught with a small group of people we know more deeply. There’s a lot more cool stuff to it, so why not take 5 minutes and watch this brief video!

The momentum of change is building at AC3, and we want you to be a part of it. Find out more about all our AC3 small groups here. 🙂