Online Worship Watch Parties
Let’s Get Ready to (Watch) Party!
In June, we will host weekly Watch Parties as we re-open in person gathering. Watch parties are Sunday morning gatherings in homes or other venues where people connect to participate in online church together. We want to create spaces where we can invite every one connected to Redemption Church to enjoy relationships and grow together as we live out our values as a church family.
As a church, we have always believed community is at the heart of our humanity. Relationships are a biblical value for us as we seek to fulfill the “one another” commands in the Bible (love one another, encourage one another, pray for one another, bear one another’s burdens, etc,). Relationships are also a strategic value for us as a primary way to find care, community, and growth.
We believe that fundamentally the church is meant to live our lives together. This is why we have always placed so much emphasis on our Redemption Groups. This (now more than ever) is our frontline of connection. There is no substitute for sitting down with our faith-family week after week and fleshing out the Scriptures as well as walking the circumstances of each life together. We want our groups to thrive. We want existing groups to grow in depth and new groups to flourish. Two phrases capture our heart for you:
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- no one walks alone – we desire to go wide inviting each of you into a group
- everyone is known – we desire to go deep engaging with grace and truth in a group
Our Sunday morning Watch Parties are a way to embody these values. We miss our friends, miss being together to worship, and miss seeing people face-to-face. We want to enable that as much as possible. Watch parties are a natural on-ramp for allowing this to happen in an organized way and a comfortable setting. We’ll be using these weeks as a focused time to teach and reflect on the commands of Christ and blessings of life together as the Church. We will take a short break from the Life of David series, and Jeff will be preaching about the WHY of church community. He’ll remind us of why the richness of the Christian life is only realized when it’s walked out together relationally.
If you are already connected to a Redemption Group, we’d encourage your group to meet during online worship and watch together. Feel free to take off from your regularly scheduled group meeting time and focus your energy together on these Sunday morning gatherings. If you are not in a Redemption Group, please let us know so we can connect you to a Watch Party! We want no one to walk alone and everyone to be known!
To frame these weeks, you may want to to listen (or re-listen) to this sermon from last year, when we explored God’s heart for his church to be more than a celebrity on a stage and consumers in an audience. God wants so much more for us! Church is not a performance we attend, it’s participation in the people of God. We do not just go to church. We are the Church!
The coming months are a chance for the church to shine the light of Christ on a far more searching world than we were four months ago. Our community wants to know the reason for the hope that is within us. Let’s open our doors and our lives to them. Let’s remember that we’ll be wise in our methods, but bold in our message.