If you’re following Jesus and it looks most like going to a series of Bible studies and church services, you’re doing it wrong. Jesus’ great commandment about loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength calls us to live lives that are thoroughly saturated with the reality of God’s presence. He demonstrated this with the way He practiced listening to and obeying the Father’s lead throughout his earthly ministry. The apostles followed his example, and we get the picture from Acts and Paul’s epistles of the early Christians being nearly constantly together in prayer, fellowship, and learning from the apostles’ teaching.

That kind of whole-life faith doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the overflow of tangible rhythms and practices that lead into increasing awareness of God’s imminent presence and the fact that we are citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven.

We live lives of rhythm and schedule. Daily, weekly, month, yearly habits, traditions, and practices are the sign posts that direct and shape who we are and what we do. That’s why within Threshingfloor we’ve identified four key spaces in our lives that we use as pathways into the kind of whole-life faith that Jesus demonstrates and commands.

 

Threshingfloor’s Four Spaces

 

Each of these four spaces is oriented towards the four primary group sizes that sociologists have identified as key to human experience. An overview of these four spaces and their focus or purpose might look like this.

 

Space	Group Size	Primary Focus	Keyword
Everyday Life	N/A	Gospel Living	ACT
DNA Group	2-4	Identity and Discipleship	GROW
Community Gathering	8-30	Family on Mission	DEMONSTRATE
All-Community Gathering	30+	Kingdom Vision	CELEBRATE

 

Everyday Life

The goal of everything we do as we cultivate Kingdom communities is aimed at shaping our everyday lives into places where we act out what Jesus has demonstrated and commanded of his people. The truth of the Gospel – that we have been cleansed of our sin, made into new creations, and given purpose in Christ as sons and daughters of the Father through Jesus’ death and resurrection – transforms everything we are and everything we do. We want every follower of Jesus to be able to confidently say that they are living in light of the Gospel in every piece of their every-day life.

This every day Gospel living is grounded in four key practices that we call SEED. I’ll explain SEED in a later post.

 

DNA Groups

DNA groups are our disciple-making engine. They are the place where deep discipleship takes place as gender-specific groups of 2-4 people gather regularly to go deep into each other’s lives and God’s word, learning to apply Gospel truths to the everyday. DNA groups are where people grow in embodying their identity in Christ and get practice making disciples.

 

Community Gatherings

The third of Threshingfloor’s four spaces are Community Gatherings. Communities are groups of 8-30 people who are united in a specific mission and are working to demonstrate and communicate the Gospel to a people group, area, or cause. Most of our communities gather weekly to share a meal, spend time in God’s word, and go out on mission. As they do so they are learning to live as the family of God on mission, demonstrating to those they are seeking to reach with the Gospel what it looks like when Jesus is King.

 

All-Community Gatherings

All-Community Gatherings are exactly what they sound like. Every couple months all of Threshingfloor’s communities come together for an evening of celebrating what God has done and renewing the vision of cultivating Kingdom Communities. We generally share a large potluck-style meal, hear stories from specific communities and DNA groups, worship, and listen to God’s Word preached.

 

Each of these four spaces are meant to cultivate daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly rhythms that carry us naturally into supernatural lives. We believe these four spaces are like the four legs of a chair – remove one and you can still sit and balance on the chair, but it won’t be a natural or comfortable place to sit since it won’t be sturdy. But with all legs in place a chair becomes a place to sit and rest.

If you’ve been a part of Threshingfloor and haven’t been engaged in one of the four spaces, commit to testing it out in 2019. We’ll be starting off the new year by jump-starting our DNA groups and All-Community Gatherings, the two places that we believe have the most space for growth. If you’re not a part of any of Threshingfloor’s spaces, check one out! You’ll discover Kingdom living is far more natural when the rhythms of your life are built around spaces and practices that are moving you towards the Father.