It was a great time. Definitely very stretching.
There were 11 international guys attending Soma School (+ around 10 americans)Most lasting impression on me was left by Jeff Vanderstelt and his talks about the Gospel, what is church, and the identities of church/christian. It was specially powerful to me cause trying to understand the Gospel has been an area where God has working in my heart the most. I am convinced that the understanding of Gospel (and the full gospel) has to be the foundation of everything that we do, and everything we are.
I am still trying to process some of the things Jeff said about the gospel. For example the full gospel (means+purpose):
Means of Salvation (Gospel power): God-Sin-Jesus-Faith not works
Purpose of Salvation (Gospel story): Creation-Fall-Redemtion-Restoration
It was great to see how their church model worked. Instead of "come to us" (attractional model) they are definitely hard-core "lets go out to them" (missional model). They are really gospel based. people in their communities really get that the church is the people. And it was also interesting to observe their dialogical story-based teaching style. People in Soma really know the Story (their term for the bible, more specifically for the redemptive arc of bible stories).
Missional communities (small groups) are really on mission, that can be the specific neighborhood or target-group specific mission. Besides that very many people had their own personal mission projects. That was really great to see.
We are starting to process everything that we heard during that week to see what can we learn from it for our local context.
Seattle skyline
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