February 20, 2025
We are excited about the new vision that a team from Corinth recently developed and want to share with you how it came about.
Over the last several months, starting in September of 2024 and only finishing a couple of weeks ago, several people who call Corinth home have met to dream together and imagine the future that God might be drawing us toward.
A thriving and growing church community is never stagnant. We never come to a place where we decide, “This is good, we’ve finished now.” Because it’s important to dream about a future Corinth, these people came together to ask, “What might Corinth be like in five or ten years?” and “What is the next step of faith for Corinth?”
The first time we gathered we interviewed each other about a time when God was working in them, through them, or around them. What we heard from almost all of those stories was that God works through relationships. Nearly every story of when God was working boiled down to a time when they were in connection with others.
In our first time together, words like authenticity, community, and relationship were repeated. People shared stories of how God showed up when they were honest about hard things.
Relationships rose to the surface as a key part of how God works, but another theme we noticed was how insufficient we are for the task before us.
First of all, that task involves being honest! How many of us have ever struggled, to be honest? I don’t enjoy sharing my private pain and struggles with others. Do you?
Even though we know that God works in authentic relationships, it can be hard to do. So we need to depend on The Holy Spirit and the power of God as we lean into these areas.
In our next gathering, we asked people to draw a picture of what it might look like if God was calling us to live in the way He was showing up most for people. All of these pictures showed two different types of relationships. We saw people with relationships inside the church and people with relationships outside of the church. These types of friendships were the dream and hope as we looked together toward the future.
Friendships seemed to be the key each person brought to the table. Friendships help us encourage one another but also can be the way we live on mission to the world.
The world around us is suffering for genuine friendship. People, both in and out of the church, are starved for authentic relationships. As we looked at how God works and what God is calling us to do, this group formulated this specific vision for our future together.
Corinth is a welcoming community of authentic belonging
deeply dependent on the power of the Holy Spirit
and called to build relationships with all people in all places.
Next, we will share more about what it might look like as we move forward with this as our next step of faith.
Jared and Jason