Join us on Sundays in February at 10:15 am as we pursue purity together.

February 7 – God Is In Your Bedroom
Spirituality and sexuality are interconnected. It may weird us out, but we start to move toward sexual wholeness when we remember that God cares deeply about your sex life – and it’s not just about keeping us from having fun.

February 14 – Love: It’s a Group Thing
Sex is about relationships, but it affects more than just our relationships with our lovers. What we do sexually impacts our communities. Part of sexual wholeness is understanding this.

February 21 – Freedom Sunday
What should be a beautiful and loving thing has often been turned into something ugly and oppressing. On Freedom Sunday, we are going to be educating ourselves about the human trafficking sex trade. Plus, we’ll be asking ourselves how what we each do creates a climate in which these atrocities are possible.

February 28 – You Are Free to Be You
God wants you to be the most whole, free person you can be. Learn how your sexuality can contribute to you being the person God made you to be.

Vintage Fellowship
2416 N. College Ave, Suite 2
Fayetteville AR
479.283.2930

www.vintagefellowship.org

When we say that we are exalting Jesus, we are not ignoring the other members of the Trinity. We are not disrespecting them. Rather, we are honoring them by participating with them in the primary work of Gods kingdom. The kingdom is all about exalting Jesus, every knee bowing to him, every tongue confessing him. In the kingdom, the Father promotes Jesus to the highest place, to the throne. In the kingdom, the Spirit doesn’t draw attention to himself but to Jesus. If this is the compelling Trinitarian mission of God, then it must be our compelling mission as well.

Bible Intake, along with prayer, is probably the most talked about spiritual discipline. We all know we need to read, memorize, and study the Bible more. Rather than trying to convince you of that, I thought I would provide some online resources.

Bible Gateway provides an online searchable Bible tool, complete many translations. It’s a simple and comprehensive site.

Daily Audio Bible is a podcast and online community in which Brian Hardin reads the Bible each day. Listen, and you will go through the Bible in a year’s time.

You Version iPhone App is a great iPhone app that allows you to search and read the Bible. It also includes links to online commentary about the passage you are reading.

provides Bible study resources in the inductive Bible study method.

Christianity Today’s Bible Study resources include some study guides for original languages.

One Year Bible guides you in reading though the Bible.

Vintage Fellowship is an emerging church serving Northwest Arkansas from Fayetteville AR. Their current series on overcoming sin by utilizing the spiritual disciplines is There’s An App For That.

Every prison movie has one – a scene where the hero is sent to “the hole” – solitary confinement. This scene is always accompanied with ominous music as the prisoner is place, often kicked and screaming, in his tiny dungeon. Days or weeks later, he emerges scruffy and grizzled. The hole a harrowing experience.

Solitude can be a scary thing. Often it is accompanied by the spiritual discipline of silence, forming a particularly daunting tag team. Yet solitude can be a very important practice that aids our spiritual development. Jesus himself frequently shunned crowds and sent his closest friends away, seeking out opportunities to be alone with his Father God.

For a whole host of reasons – our schedules and commitments, the TV, the allure of our beds -we don’t practice the discipline of solitude very often. The very things that scare us about solitude are the things that make is such a powerful tool.

Solitude allows us to think, but often we don’t like being alone with our thoughts. Aloneness gives us a chance to focus. We live in an ADHD culture where we are constantly bombarded with images and messages that are seeking to shape our values. Undiscerningly, we get duped into believing lies because we don’t have the time to evaluate them. Solitude rips us out of hectic rat race and forces us to face what we think, what we value, what we believe.

Solitude makes me be with me, the authentic me. I am not always the authentic me. Sometimes at work, I play a part. Sometimes at home, I play a part. Sometimes at church, I play a part. In all the different contexts of my life, it is easy to slip into a role. The authentic me is sometimes sacrificed for ease and comfort’s sake. And I don’t always like the authentic me.

In solitude, I have no audience and so I have no need to play a part. It is the authentic me .. and God. When I am the authentic me, I have the chance to be honest and humble. When it’s just me and God, I can be painfully honest about my struggles and doubts. When it’s just me and God, I can be humble about my achievements and lack thereof. God knows who I really am. And in the solitude, I can admit that I know too.

This kind of honesty and humility is what faith is all about. And so the chief benefit of solitude for me is that it produces faith.

Faith to be courageous when I’m tempted to be afraid.
Faith to be obedient when I’m tempted to be rebellious.
Faith to be reliant when I’m tempted to be self-sufficient.
Faith to be daring when I’m tempted to be reticent.
Faith to be a leader when I’m tempted to do nothing.
Faith to be open when I’m tempted to be reserved.

I cannot be who God wants me to be without relationship with other people. However, I cannot be who God wants me to be without periodically taking the time to be myself by myself.

So, during this month of spiritual discipline, let me encourage you to try solitude. Take a walk by yourself without your iPod or cellphone. Take a drive with the radio off. Get up early and have a cup of coffee in the darkness. Be yourself in the solitude and see what it does for your faith.

Vintage Fellowship is an emerging church serving Northwest Arkansas from Fayetteville AR. Their current series on spiritual disciplines is called There’s An App For That.

Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales; rather, train yourself to be godly.
1 Timothy 4.7

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We’ve gotten pretty skeptical of the marketing clichés, haven’t we? We don’t really think that the infomercial cleaning product is going to make housework a breeze. We don’t really think that the debt elimination program is going to have us living on easy street in no time. We don’t really think that the cream is going to reverse aging. We’ve learned not to trust the hype, and rightfully so.

But what about the spiritual hype? Walk into any Christian bookstore, and you will be inundated with tons of books, magazines, and products offering you tips and secrets to godliness. The marketing sounds a lot like its secular counterpart. Most of the time, though, that is all it is – marketing.

Godliness is not a secret. Sins don’t just magically disappear from our lives. Habits don’t undo themselves. Like anything else worth doing, the process of living for Jesus in this world takes some hard work and effort.

As Paul advises his young friend Timothy, we need to train ourselves to be godly. An essential part of that training is the spiritual disciplines. The spiritual disciplines are behaviors and exercises that have been developed and practiced by followers of Jesus (and others, for that matter) that serve to deepen our ability to live godly lives.

Certainly, these practices don’t earn us God’s love or favor. They don’t make us more lovable or desirable to God. The Bible is clear that your relationship with God is based solely on your faith in Jesus who has accomplished it for you on the cross. You can’t work your way into God’s good graces.

Rather, the spiritual disciplines position us to be ready and available recipients of God’s ongoing grace in our lives. Let’s be honest – frequently, we are not in the right frame of mind to connect with God. We are distracted or confused or busy or stubborn. We need something to shake us out of our normal routine and rhythm. These practices open us up to see and hear things we may have otherwise missed.

Further, we can think of the spiritual disciplines like exercises. Say, for instance, that you have a muscle that is flabby and weak. There are certain exercises you can learn and perform that will enable you to develop tone and build strength in that problem area. Spiritual disciplines do the same thing, helping us to target and address the specific sins that we struggle with.

It’s not a comprehensive list, but here are some disciplines and the sins they can help address:

Bible Intake – selfishness, addiction
Prayer – worry, lust
Fasting – gluttony, sexual immorality
Church Attendance – laziness, judgmentalism
Generosity – greed, consumerism
Silence – gossip, lying, an uncontrolled tongue
Journaling – bad attitudes, uncontrolled emotions
Meditating – believing lies, unhealthy self-talk
Solitude – busyness, stress
Confession – hypocrisy, wrath
Simplicity – materialism, envy
Guidance – pride, self-reliance

My challenge and encouragement to you is to pick one of these disciplines that addresses some area of struggle in your life. Research it, learn it, and do it. And you never know what God may do in and through you as a result!

Vintage Fellowship is an emerging church serving Northwest Arkansas from Fayetteville AR. Their current series on utilizing spiritual disciplines to overcome sin is called There’s An App For That.

He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I have been thinking a lot lately about community. It is word we use often in our emerging conversation. But maybe for all of our talking about the need for community, we haven’t reflected enough on how it is actually experienced. My thinking lately has coalesced around three ideas: community takes actual relationships, a heavy dose of reality, and a good bit of resilience.

I am always amazed by people who speak of community but don’t invest themselves in actual relationships. I’ve seen this as a pastor when people talk about how they love church community but they don’t talk to people at worship gatherings (if they attend at all) and don’t join small groups when they are offered. It reminds me a little bit of the young woman who has every detail of her wedding planned and is only missing the groom. What is community without relationships? Community is not some mystical or magical thing that happens outside of ourselves. Community only takes places where relationships exist, where friendships are growing, where people are connecting.

Relationships require investment. If I am going to be in community with a group of people, I need to invest myself in them and be prepared for them to invest themselves in me. Investment takes time, emotion, energy, even money – all of my precious resources that are already scarce. I need to listen and not just talk. I need to give and not just take. I need to initiate and not just respond.

True community also requires a substantial grip on reality. Bonhoeffer’s observation that people who love their dream of community more than the actual Christian community end up destroying the actual community is a profound one. How often has a person been so enamored by the prospect of being in love that they have driven their potential lover away by being too clingy and needy?

The same happens with churches. People come to church will all sorts of expectations (frequently unrealistic) and ideas and dreams. Many who have been hurt and burned by church are hopeful that their new community will finally live up to those dreams. Rarely can a church leap such a high bar. I get a little skittish when new folks at Vintage gush about how it’s the church they’ve been looking for. I know that if they invest themselves in relationships within our community that it’s only a matter of time before they experience reality. The reality is that churches are made up of weak, frail, and hurting people – and those who are pretending that they are not.

Weak, frail, and hurting people tend to hurt each other sometimes. Words are spoken out of turn. Memories fail. Priorities differ. Expectations are unmet. People are often selfish and immature and slow to do the right thing. The dream of community and the reality community are often far apart in our actual experience.

Does this mean that we should abandon the church whenever our feelings are hurt? Absolutely not. If we abandon anything, we should abandon our dream of community and embrace the reality of community. And this takes resilience. Community grows and develops over time. It is deepened and solidified by interpersonal conflicts.

Community is not a happily-ever-after fairy tale. Community is, to borrow another phrase from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, life together. It can only take place when we commit ourselves to experience the ups and downs, the joys and disappointments, the twists of turns of reality in relationships with one another.

This runs counter to our cultural inclination. We live in a disposable culture. Take the unfolding saga of Jon and Kate Gosselin of Jon & Kate + 8 fame. While it might be easy to join the crowd that is casting stones at them for disposing of their marriage and family. Maybe we ought to consider how we collectively have used up and disposed of them. Their story was entertaining for a while, and as it has taken a turn for the worst, we’ve been content to stand by and crack jokes. Soon, we’ll be on to voyeuristically enjoying some other celebrity’s crisis. When we haven’t invested much in them and when we weren’t realistic about them in the first place (even though they were on a “reality show”), it doesn’t cost us much to dispose of relationships.

We dispose of relationships far too easily. As Bob Dylan once sang, “But to remain as friends you need the time to make amends and stay behind.”

If we dispose of actual community too soon in hopes of finding our dream of community, we will end up never experiencing either. Community is experienced when we know each other well enough to be ourselves. Community is experienced when forgiveness is needed and extended. Community is experienced in the tears of disappointment and recommitment. Community is experienced in the joy and pain of reconciliation.

In Philippians, Paul spoke of the fellowship (relationships) of sharing (resilience) in the suffering (reality) of Jesus. That’s not a dream; that’s how actual community is experienced.

–

The Vision of Vintage Fellowship:
Because of Jesus’ grace in our lives, we at Vintage Fellowship belong to him and each other, becoming more like him, so that we can behave like he would, helping others to believe in him too.

Vintage Fellowship is an emerging church in Fayetteville AR.
Visit Vintage online.

As a part of our worship gathering today, we reflected on the image of God in us. During worship, we were invited to look at the following collages of faces and reflect. Look into these faces. What do we learn about God in them?

Here’s a sample of the responses:

God made us to think and dream.
The diversity of God’s attributes and the uniqueness of his character is the sum of his gifts and characteristics that make each of us in his image and likeness.
God’s super creative.
God loves diversity!
God is the breath of life.
God makes some people leaders.
God is truly beyond definition when so many people are made in his image!
God made each individual uniquely beautiful, exactly as he wants them.
God gave us different personalities and characteristics.
God greatly enjoys his creation.
God has many faces, but one set eyes that show his love.
They all have importance and intrinsic value to God. Every person has value and worth.
We are different! Gods design is limitless.
God is the joy we feel in unity.
God made each and everyone of us in his image!
God is beautiful!
God gave culture to the earth.
No one is beyond God’s love.

Believe – Behave – Belong

For a long time, churches have operated with this process to assimilate new members. To be a part of a church, the first step a person had to take was to subscribe to believing the doctrinal statement of that church. If a person had doubts or differences on various things, large or small, it would cause a huge hurdle to belonging. An elder or deacon board could even deny a person membership to a church for not believing the right things. As a result, people learned that to belong, they would have to cross all the right belief T’s … or at least pretend like they did.

Once a person consented to believing the right things, then they would have to behave a certain way to achieve belonging. In some cases, they would have to renounce movies or alcohol or wearing jeans on Sundays or swearing or smoking. At one church I am familiar with, a man had to quit his job as a casino security guard before he was allowed to join the church. Once again, people had to act a certain way … often faking it … so that they could be a part of the church.

The result of this approach is inauthenticity and judgmentalism. The people on the outside wanting to get in are guilted into hypocrisy by putting on their Sunday best and pretending like they’ve got it all together and have all the answers. The people on the inside get to pass judgment on who is or is not worthy of membership based on people’s ability to conform to some external standards or their ability to articulate an approved belief system. Either way, the path to belonging is easy thwarted.

Belong – Behave – Believe

At Vintage, we are trying to invert this order. While we are not the church for everyone, we are a church for anyone. A person doesn’t have to agree with everything the pastor says to be a part of our community. Nor does a person have to be free of doubts and questions to be accepted, loved, and included. For us, it’s not about who is in and who is out. We see ourselves as a community of people on a journey, trying our best to follow Jesus together. We want to affirm anyone who is on that path, regardless of how far down the trail she may be.

Don’t take this to mean that we don’t think theology or discipleship is important. Quite the contrary. We think it is very, very important to understand and clearly articulate what we believe. We are trying to help people wrestle with their doubts and grow in their faith. And we think it’s very important that people live according to the example of Jesus – with love, grace, justice, and truth. We are trying to give people the tools and opportunities to walk in Jesus’ steps.

We know that our approach makes things messier sometimes. But we’re ok with that. We’re convinced that when people find a community of friends to live life with, a church to belong to, they will be able to best experience the grace and truth that will develop them into the people God wants them to be.

The Vision of Vintage Fellowship:
Because of Jesus’ grace in our lives, we at Vintage Fellowship belong to him and each other, becoming more like him, so that we can behave like he would, helping others to believe in him too.

Vintage Fellowship is an emerging church in Fayetteville AR.
visit Vintage online

As a way to prepare our hearts, minds, and souls to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday, we have started a blog for the Lenten season. This blog gives us a place to chat about what God is doing in us through this time. I hope you’ll stop by.

Blogging Lent

Check out a nice article about Vintage and some other NWA churches in today’s Morning News.