Where Real Life Happens

We believe it takes spiritual family dynamics lived out over time for God’s people to grow up in Christ and change the world. This community happens when we are authentic with one another, so that we ourselves are known and we also know others, warts and all. As we meet regularly with the same believers, being spiritually and emotionally naked with each other, we grow to become family. It is within a family-like structure, where we do reciprocal ministry in the Spirit – that we move from “loving God for my sake” to “loving the church for God’s sake.”

We invite you to learn more about Lifegroups below. To experience this community fully please visit any of our life groups that meet all over Dallas. Your life will be changed!

If you have questions or need more information on Lifegroups, please contact Donjalea Chrane.

“What if the root problem in a Christian’s life beneath all the personal, emotional, and spiritual struggles is unreleased goodness, identity, and power?” – Larry Crabb

Lifegroups help us eagerly look for the good God within.

When Lifegroup Happens …

• We learn to give and receive.

• We take ownership of being organically connected to one another, as the fingers are to the hand of a living human body.

• We move from being disconnected strangers to powerfully connected brothers and sisters.

• We eat spiritual meat and exercise the ligaments and muscles in our bodies, and then grow up into a mature humanity in Christ.

• We learn how to become mature human beings (1 Cor. 12:1-31 and Eph. 4:11-16).

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During the first three centuries of the Christian faith, home living rooms were where spiritual life was nurtured and released in community. People were discipled rigorously and the Roman social order was transformed.

Their lives were changed by meeting regularly together. As a result of the Holy Spirit’s work, the church in the Roman Empire grew from about 7,500 believers in 100 A.D. to six million by 300 A.D. (Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity and Alan Kreider, The Change of Conversion and the Origin of Christendom).

However, when Constantine legalized Christianity in the fourth century, churches moved out of homes and into Roman basilicas, which had been built originally for pagan religions. In these huge buildings, members now sat in rows of seats facing an elevated altar at the front, where the “ministry” was done by a priest.

The Protestant Reformation did nothing to change the architecture except to replace the altar with a pulpit, changing the focus from the Mass to a weekly sermon.

Even today, many Christians experience church as a spectator sport, in which thousands of people fill a huge room and watch one or two ministers preach the word.

The difference between the first century and today is that in today’s church model, members can remain anonymous and unequipped with only a few paid professional specialists doing the real “ministry.”

To recover the biblical dynamic of extravagantly relational, spiritual community. Real family happens in lifegroup. We get to be brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers for each other. Powerful relationships form that help heal us and empower us to be more of what God has called us to be.

Lifegroup takes the words spoken and thought about in sermons and embodies them in a community that practices the “one another” verses like “bearing one another’s burdens,” “confessing sin one to another” and “encouraging one another.” Otherwise the words are left inside big church buildings and never translated into conversations and lives. Our lifegroups are not add-ons; they are at the heart of what church is.

What Lifegroups Are Not

• Psychological encounter groups where we analyze our members and their family trees. Instead, our purpose is to nurture and release one another in Christ as Paul is doing in Ephesians 1-6.

• Mere social gatherings that never move out of the shallow end of the pool. Instead, lifegroups work into us the truth and the deep meaning of Christ in us as we touch, comfort, rebuke, encourage and hold one another accountable.

• Intellectual Bible studies, but instead a place to ask, “How has the Bible read you lately?”

http://www.lakehighlandschurch.org/lifegroup-listings/

LIFEGROUP LISTINGS