Sunday message · Fresh Start series
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Message Summary
In the second message of the Fresh Start series, Pastor Phillip Santillan explains why missional communities are essential to disciple-making, drawing on Romans 12:4–5 and Hebrews 10:23–25. The series is about renewing our commitment and aligning our everyday rhythms toward actually making disciples, and Phil believes that happens when people live as family and as missionaries in the places God has planted them. We all know community is essential to a healthy life, he says, yet not everyone feels it, and even fewer feel it is essential to their spiritual lives.
He cites Robert Putnam’s research in Bowling Alone, which found that isolated people are three times more likely to die than people embedded in community, and that people with poor health habits but strong social ties outlive isolated people with great habits. Phil jokes that it seems better to eat at Dairy Queen with friends than rice cakes alone. If community matters this much for our bodies, it matters even more for our spiritual lives. The quality of our commitment to discipleship, he says, is determined by the quality of our engagement with a community on mission.
Romans 12 says that just as our bodies have many parts, each with a special function, we are many parts of one body and belong to each other. God made us to long for belonging, and that longing is meant to draw us into the body of Christ, yet we often settle for pseudo-community that never satisfies our thirst to be fully known and fully loved. We also settle for groups focused only on learning, like a Bible study, or only on belonging, like a small group for making friends. Both are necessary, Phil says, but because each part has a special function, community should lead us to do something with our faith: make disciples.
Many believe community is a big risk, but Phil says the real risk is isolation, while community is simply uncomfortable. He reads from Brett McCracken’s Uncomfortable, which lists with humor the kinds of people who annoy us at church and concludes that no church will be free of them, and that God’s adopted children cannot retreat into cliques of people just like them. So the first step is to accept that community is messy. Jesus’ community doesn’t mean being with people who are easy to be with, but with people forgiven by Jesus, just like you, helping each other learn to love and live like him.
The second step is to commit to a strategic process. Hebrews 10:23–25 urges believers to hold tightly to hope, motivate one another to love and good works, and not neglect meeting together. Genuine community never happens accidentally, so Phil urges everyone who follows Jesus to commit to a process, here or elsewhere, that finds them a year from now loving Jesus more, loving others more and making more disciples. After four years of learning, Clarity is relaunching its missional communities, and he personally invites everyone to take a next step and sign up, even before they know how it will fit.
