what a sunday

At the end of the service, a friend of mine and attender of new community, came to the stage unannounced and gave a quick snapshot of her experience with death. She described that she died and went to heaven but came back. It was truly an amazing story and most of us in the room were asking a lot of questions after this unplanned spoken word. She explained how "heaven" is right here and that our death is really a step into that reality.

So, let me clarify some things if i may

1. It took great courage to walk up front and share her Personal story with everyone. I talked with her afterwards and let her know she put me in a very awkward and vulnerable position as the leader of new community. As the leader of New Community it is my responsibility to make sure that content shared with the church is scriptural and relevant. Unplanned testimonies take the responsibility out of my hands. I also explained to her that as a staff, we were in the middle of trying to figure out how to protect the stage and group from circumstances like these when someone unannounced walks up. New Community will ask everyone to refrain from this happening in the future and all interviews/testimonies will be pre-determined so that we know what is being said before hand.

2. It was said that "heaven" is right here among us. As we have described many times before, heaven is another dimension. The physical, tangible world we live in is just one dimension of our reality. I think what was being communicated was the fact that the physical and spiritual overlap. We discussed this in July and I would encourage you to listen to those messages from our website. We have also taught that when Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he instructed them to ask the father, "may your kingdom (God's space) come, may your will be done on Earth as it is already done in heaven". This paints a picture of those two colliding.

3. As far as her actual experience, we have to trust that the supernatural things that happen as we live here are hard to explain and hard to understand when it is bigger than we can wrap our heads around. New Community doesn't neccessarily have a "position" on Her experience because there are no scriptures to instruct or guide us with this type of thing. Where the scriptures speak, we speak, where the scriptures are silent, we are silent. What I do know is that these types of experiences are happening more and more often as time races on. Our job is to discern what is shared and give God the glory for what he is doing.

Grace and Peace...my friends.