Community Stories
These short stories either follow what Spring Church is focusing on in a particular season, like Christmas or Easter, or they take culturally relevant topics and frame them through a Biblical lens. You can look through our entire category of over 7 years of stories using the dropdown.
Who Will Disciple You?
8 minute read
Let me ask you a personal question: Is your mother-in-law a bitter person? (Feel free to substitute “mother-in-law” with mother, father, spouse, child, sister, brother, or anyone else who is a part of your family.)
What if My Pentecost Life and my Normal Life is the Same Life?
7 minute read
Pentecost has often been a peculiar day for me. I love the story of how the third member of the Trinity is sent: I love the fire, and wind, and the Church preaching in a miraculous foreign language. I love reading the book of Acts like a script for a movie, and I love how this story reminds us every year about how the Holy Spirit is still with the Church today.
Soccer with five-year-olds
Few things illustrate an integrated life like youth soccer, and I love how youth soccer illustrates how much I have to learn from the youth.
My Normal Life and my Great Commission Life are the Same (Part 3)
Iain’s observation, which helped me walk away from an unhealthy separation of my Great Commission life from my Normal Life, was that mentoring is something that happens best within the context of friendship. And we embodied mentorship and friendship in a way that became more clear to me. We had both, at the same time.
My Normal Life and my Great Commission Life are the same Life (Part 2)
I loved all the conversations and prayers and moments of realizing that Denise was right: discipleship begins in the home. But discerning what to do next is another matter entirely.
My Normal Life and my Great Commission Life are the same Life (Part 1)
What if the Great Commission included all these dirty diapers? What if the Great Commission is about this family, and this giant pile of laundry, and our neighbors, and the people at work, and our small group, and church? Why do we have to stop our Normal Life, go do some amazing Great Commission Thing somewhere far away, and then come back to our Normal Life?
I Miss Eating With You
Our pursuit of food has shaped the evolution of our sensory apparatus—the very tools through which we, as a species, perceive the world. The choices we make every day about food selection, preparation, and consumption lie at the foundation of our identities and relationships and affinities. As the Italian historian Massimo Montanari succinctly put it, food is culture.
The Gift of Special Needs
The best advice I can give you is to go adopt a kid with special needs, because having a kid with special needs has made me more patient, made me slow down and pay attention to the person who is right in front of me, made me listen to the child that I have rather than the child I wished I’d had, and made me look at my own failures and still love myself and my family.
A church that feels like Unified Soccer
I want to be a part of services where the pace of the worship can shift depending on who’s there and what they need, where the teaching integrates a variety of learning styles (because everyone can teach and everyone can learn), and where friendships that don’t naturally happen in our culture can flourish.
Advent In A Barn
For younger children, this Advent I’ve been talking about playing Follow The Leader.
I’ve enjoyed framing what we do through the game Follow The Leader, as it’s helped younger kids latch onto the reason why we do the things we do around Advent.
Game Night
Our family of five have been meeting as our own little church for the last few months, mainly so our kids could start learning how to use their voices in church.
Camping & Worship
Our family of five have been meeting as our own little church for the last few months, mainly so our kids could start learning how to use their voices in church.
Worship In The Garden
Our family of five have been meeting as our own little church for the last few months, mainly so our kids could start learning how to use their voices in church.
Earth Day Worship
When our service is in our home, we light a candle to help set apart this particular time and this particular place as a sacred space for worship. And we all love fire.
Ash Wednesday with Middle Schoolers
Our family of five have been meeting as our own little church for the last few months, mainly so our kids could start learning how to use their voices in church.
Chapel at St. Paul's Academy
Two mornings a week I get to lead worship services for the students and staff at Saint Paul’s Academy, and I love it.
Dumb Beach
Among the activities we chose was an adventure to Shipwreck Beach. We’d load up in some vans, check out the island as we drive a few hours on some backcountry dirt roads, and then hike to a beach where there was an actual shipwreck.