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A few weeks ago in a sermon, I pointed you to Ephesians chapter two, which, in my opinion, is one of the most beautiful theological descriptions of the church in the entire New Testament. And Paul uses a phrase in that selection of verses I didn't have time to unpack a few weeks ago, and I want to use that phrase to frame today's conversation. And we were going to read this, but I want you to listen to how Paul describes our relationship with each other now that we are fellow believers in Jesus Christ. He says this in Ephesians 2.19. Consequently, which means, based on what I've just said and what he had just said, is because you are now followers of Jesus, consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God's people and also members of his household. I want you to think about the implication of that phrase that calls us fellow members of his household, not just attendees or followers or spectators that come in to be entertained. When we gather, we gather as his house, his household, his family. For years in the church, we have taught and preached that we should pursue the meaningful building of relationships that form us into the image of Christ. And you hear us say all the time life change happens more in circles than it does in rows, more in those small group formative relationships than it does in a row in a service on Sunday. It's all about spiritually formational relationships and deep connection. And most of the time when we're talking about this, we use the word community to describe it. That's what our heart is searching for, real community. But today, I want to refer to a phrase that we use quite often around here that carries more weight than the concept of community. You can find a certain level of community just about anywhere. If you stick with those relationships long enough, you can have community with your hobby friends. Your CrossFit Pod knows your PRs and they'll show up for you. There are several guys in your hometown that have met at the same table every single day having coffee together for years. That's a level of community. And science verifies that it's good for you. Deep social connection is healthy for you mentally, physically, and relationally. But there is a category above community. And it's something that happens when the thing that is holding us together is not a hobby or a sport or a shared schedule. It's a shared encounter with Jesus. When our shared encounter with Jesus is the affinity that our relationships are built around, we grow into more than a community. We grow into a spiritual family. And spiritual family doesn't just provide it does, but this is not all the benefits that the social sciences say mentally, physically, and emotionally. Beyond that, spiritual family will form and shape us into the image of Christ. Spiritual family offers a level of transformation that the average understanding of community can't. And that's what Paul is speaking to in Ephesians 2.19. You have been saved into his household. You have been saved into a family, which leads to the question I want us to wrestle with today. As we continue to grow as a church, how do we make sure that we don't simply become a crowd, but we continue to mature into a spiritual family? And to address that question, I want to spend a little more time than I normally would talking about some cultural implications that we're living through right now. And I want us to see how we got here. And by here, I mean the place where churches in our culture are becoming more like the gathering of a crowd than the building of a family. And it's after we've looked at the cultural impact on our relationships, we're gonna go back to the scripture to see how God's word addresses this. The church becoming a crowd problem has some underlying causes that are easy to overlook. Things that are less obvious, like the issue of mobility. You heard that right? Mobility. Follow along with me and let me explain what I mean for a minute. For 1900 years, up until about a hundred years ago, when people went to church, they went to church with people who knew them incredibly well, Monday through Saturday. There was no mobility. Without the ability to have mobility, people for the most part lived in smaller rural towns and villages and rarely traveled far from where they were born. Everybody knew everybody's business. And when you came to church, there was no ability to project an image or pretend that you were somebody you weren't because everybody lived with the real you in that really small place. For the most part, for the first 1900 years after the resurrection of Jesus, churches were much smaller because nobody could come from far away. But today, when we go to church, we go to church with people who know very little about us. We're going to church with people who are basically strangers. And the ones that we say we know could probably better be described as a basic acquaintance. There's probably only a handful of people at church that we truly know and truly know us. And realize it or not, that seemingly insignificant fact changes everything about church and everything about life-giving relationships. For instance, think of a normal Sunday church greeting. Somebody walks in, the greeter asks them how they're doing, they say, fine. Because that's the church answer. We say fine no matter what. Your kid could have stumbled in stoned out of their mind at 3 a.m. this morning, and you worry, you were what you were there waiting up, I mean, worried, sick about them, or your company is about to go under, or your house is in foreclosure. But the answer to the greeter at the door is fine. Look, I get it. In our culture, when someone says, How are you doing? they're usually not really asking, and they usually don't really want to know. How are you doing in our culture? Is just small talk for, hey, I see you. We don't really want to know all the stuff. But somewhere in our lives, we have to have the kind of relationships that when people say, How are you doing, they are not meaning I see you. They really genuinely care and are concerned about how we're doing and they want to know. When we say fine and we're not fine, we need people in our lives who know us well enough to say, don't give me that baloney, because they know us well enough to know better. So what's going on that has caused churches to become places where that doesn't happen anymore? Where we become more of a crowd that fosters surface level, casual, distant relationships than the development of deep relationship and a spiritual family. Of course, we could all list tons of things that probably have a bearing on this, but a lot of our answers are too simplistic. And often we miss some of the underlying societal and cultural changes that have created the currents that are pushing against deep relational connection, like the concept of mobility. But here's another one. We're too busy. And the underlying cause of our busyness is that our culture values time and money more than relationships. That's not the case in every culture everywhere in the world, but it is here in the American culture. Meaningful relationship takes time to foster and develop. But because we value our time and our money more than meaningful relationships, we live our lives at a pace where there is not enough margin to make deep connection. Here's another one. Technology has made our relationships surface. Social media has allowed us to become cowardly in our relationships. We get to hide behind a screen and vent our harsh words and whine and complain and gossip. And we do it boldly. We say things we would never say if we were in a real face-to-face conversation in a real relationship. And it's brought the worst out in us. Getting to hide behind a screen has thrown fuel on the fire of our sin nature. All of this is a part of the bigger conversation about why it's easier to build a crowd than it is to build a spiritual family, and we could keep going on with this list. But I want to go back to the first one a minute because I know when I mentioned it, it left you scratching your head a little bit. As overlooked as mobility may be, I want us to think a little more about how it's created some of the difficulty in our culture on relationship. Just think about in the last hundred years how the automobile has impacted our relationships. A couple generations ago, it was very common for a family to be a single-car family. Families planned around a father that worked and a mother who would grocery shop when dad got off work or on the weekends. The role of women began to shift, and many women transitioned into professional career women instead of stay-at-home moms, which necessitated a second car. And then there was a time when a kid who got a car at age 16 was considered the most spoiled of kids. But today it's not uncommon when it happens in middle class families. They're not considered spoiled because most parents can't keep up with everybody's crazy schedule, and it feels like a necessity. Think about it. All of our sports used to be played in school, and practice was during the school hours, except rare Friday night events or some things that happen at night. Now everybody's playing club, soccer, select, baseball, traveling, football, hockey. Nothing extracurricular happens during the school hours anymore. The world has changed. The demands on our time have increased, and our increased mobility is what's made all this possible. You used to have to go to the church that was the closest. You used to have to shop at the closest. Everything had to be nearby. But once the automobile was everywhere, we no longer had to go to the closer. Now we could go to the better. We started driving past local mom and pop stores to the big box stores because the big box had more items at better prices. And the same phenomena is what created the big box church. What was the big box store? That all that happened, that's what created big church. And when I say big church, most of us that live here in Texas are thinking of massive churches with tens of thousands of people, but historically, a big church is any church with 300 or more people. Until recent history, because of limited mobility, if a church had 300 people in it, it was considered massive. Now we look at a church with two to 300 people and we think of that as a small church. I want you to see an article I read from Psychology Today. It was a 2024 article that was investigating the difference that church size makes on relational dynamics. And they were saying it probably makes a lot less impact than you might think. This was the quote the human brain can only track a finite number of stable social bonds, meaning true community debt caps out around 150 individuals, regardless of whether a building holds 100 or 10,000 people. The article is not saying that churches over 100 are bad. It's just emphasizing the necessity of being intentional and creating the space for people to find what their heart needs: relational connection and meaningful bond. If a church only has 150 people in it, studies have proven it's already too big to function as a spiritual family without focus and intentionality. And it simply means the more people you reach for Christ and the larger the church grows, the more focus has to be put on fighting against the drift to becoming a crowd instead of a family. The church of 150 or 1,500 or 15,000 are all facing similar issues in our current cultural climate. Let me just give you three of those problems. First, the church can slowly become something we go to instead of something we are. We go to church, we go to a restaurant afterwards, we go to the gym on Monday. Church can just be another place that we go, like an event where we go hear a talk and they have some engaging activities for our kids and youth. And if we're not careful, we become consumers and start looking through church through the lenses we look at every other retail thing in our life, asking what's in it for me. Just like driving past the mom and pop hardware store to get to the bigger box because it offers more options at greater convenience with cheaper prices. From church to retail. In our culture, there's no brand loyalty anymore. We quit the mom and pop shop because they were out of stock all the time with what we needed most, and Home Depot had it in stock cheaper with five different brand options and four color options. So we kept going back to Home Depot. It's convenient, it meets my needs better. And we went to Home Depot often enough that we met all the staff there, and they thought we were really tied in with them, but boy, they were ever wrong because Lowe's opened up closer to my home and sent me those grand opening coupons. And now I gotta go see if their help is better and their price is better and their quality is better because I'm a consumer. And for a consumer, when it's more convenient with cheaper prices, and they have six brand options and seven color choices, I switch. We have crossed over from neighborhood loyalty to going to the better thing. The same thing has happened in church in America. I don't like the music, I don't like the new design, the preacher said something I don't like, boom, we just leave. It's the culture that we live in. Every cultural moment of all times has been a product of a fallen world, and every generation of the church has had to deal with their own issues. These are just some of ours. And we have to face them the same way the church in the past has, with scripture, with the power of the Holy Spirit, and with the wisdom that God provides. And we need to ask the question: how do we hold on to the blessings of people being reached for Christ and all these baptisms and all these life changes and a growing church? How do we hold on to the good that all of the technology and mobility provides to do it better and more resources and engaging programs and a larger pool and volunteers without letting the bad take over? And here's part of the bad. Churches can become something we go to rather than something we are, and we become a part of a crowd instead of being a vital member of his household, his spiritual family. Here's a second problem. We started thinking of Christianity more and more as a private relationship. Listen to this. Your walk with Christ is personal, it is very personable. But biblically, it was never meant to be private. Personal, but not private. There is a big difference between the two. The Bible teaches that every follower of Jesus belongs to his body. We are members of his household. We belong to something shared, something that was meant to be collective. But here's the American idea of faith and religion, and the idea of too many people in the church. My spirituality is just between me and God. Well, that's not a biblical idea of Christianity. That is a modern American cultural construct. And here's the greatest danger in it. When our faith becomes private, we start down a path towards sin. Because we start judging right and wrong by what we personally feel peace about rather than what the scripture calls sin. All of us have had moments in our lives where the word of God said one thing clearly: do this or don't do that. And the command of Scripture was very inconvenient to what I wanted or what I felt I needed. We didn't have peace about it, doing what the scripture said, so we go in a different direction and we ultimately have to reap the consequence of that bad decision. I've even challenged people as a pastor and said, wait a minute, the Bible says blank, and they say, Oh, oh, I know, but I don't have peace about it. As if there's a little footnote on that verse that says, This is true for everybody but them. There is not a footnote there for anybody. But that's what consumerism and crowds turn us into when we really don't know anybody, and nobody really knows us enough to challenge us, all because we believe our relationship with God is supposed to be private. Here's a third problem that has grown out of our current cultural climate. We have nowhere to live out the one-anothers of Scripture. There are over 50 commands in the Bible of things that we are told to do for one another. We are to pray for one another, we are to forgive one another, we are to love one another, we are to bear one another's burdens, we are to confess our sins to one another, and there are over 45 more of those kinds of statements. But in a crowd, the one another's stop happening. For example, when a church turns into a crowd, we create a benevolence fund and we all chip our money into the benevolence fund so the organization and the paid professionals can take care of the needs of people. But the sad thing is when that happens, the corporation begins to take care of everybody in need around us, and we stop seeing it as our responsibility to bear another person's burden because we gave something to the benevolence fund. We shifted that responsibility to the organization. There are so many more, these are three of the problems, but to deal with any of them, we got to go to scripture and see what God wants from us. And here's what the writer of Hebrews says in Hebrews 10. And let us consider how we may spur one another on. Spur one, that's another one, another statement, toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another all the more as you see the day approaching. You have to understand why the writer of Hebrews is so adamant about us being together, the more we see the urgency of the hour in the inminent return of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Greek word, we our English word says spur. The original word means agitate, provoke, push. It would read like this, and let us consider how we may agitate, provoke, push on, spur one another on toward love and good deeds. In other words, this passage is not a guilt trip to get you to show up at church. The passage is making sure that you have godly peer pressure in your life. We all know people that we're around them, they bring out the best in us. Other people, when we're around them, they bring out the worst in us. Either way, we're being influenced. The writer of the Proverbs says it this way: walk with the wise and become wise. Associate with fools and get in trouble. Either way, we're being influenced. When the writer of Hebrews says, spur one another on, he's saying, make sure you're in a place where you're influenced in the right direction, where you're gathering with the right kind of people in an environment where there is godly peer pressure in your life. But once the church hits two or three hundred people, especially when it grows to thousands, we can be really good at faking it because we're all driving in from deep places and we get away with saying fine when it's really not, and we can project an image at least for an hour on Sunday because few, if any, know the real us. Now we may come and get motivated and inspired, and that's the advantage of a great church like ours with strong teaching and great worship. It's easy to get inspired, but that's very different than biblically being spurred on toward love and good deeds because you're in life-giving discipling relationships with people who know you and you really know. Listen to this from James 5. My brothers and sisters, if one of you should wander from the truth, and someone should bring that person back, remember this whoever turns a sinner from the error of their way will save them from death and cover a multitude of sins. The picture here is of a group of Christian people doing life together, where one of them begins to wander away from the truth of God and live the Lie of the enemy. And James says if one of you notices that other believer going astray and you go after them, and due to the relational equity you've built, you lovingly pull them back, you will keep that person from spiritual death. But here's what it assumes: it assumes that you know when I'm straying. It assumes that I know when you're straying, even in a small church. If you're not intentional about relationships outside of Sunday morning gatherings, nobody's ever gonna know when anybody has wandered until they're already 400 miles off the trail. When you're in relationship, in community, fostering spiritual family with a smaller group of people, you start to catch the straying heart at the beginning stage before it reaches the disaster stage. But how do we keep these kinds of meaningful relationships in a growing church? First, we got to be genuinely known. Every single one of us needs to be genuinely known. I will never be all that God has called me to be if I'm able to live my life pretending and faking behind an image I've created. Somewhere in my life, I've got to be genuinely known. We must be genuinely known because anonymity breeds sin. In our fallen nature, we all live differently when we think nobody is watching. Temptation is always greatest when secrecy is the strongest. The people that sell sex know this. Notice that most of the triple X shops are located in remote places along the interstate. Or they intentionally locate their strip clubs in proximity to major airports because they know businessmen will come to those places when they are far from home when they would have never visited those places down the street from their house. Anonymity breeds sin. So if we want to grow in Christ, we have to address the draw toward anonymity. We have to make it hard on ourselves to hide. Secondly, we all need to be lovingly supported. Christianity is not a solo sport. When I have an issue, I'm struggling with areas in my life that I need to grow, I need to be supported. God wired me not to live in isolation and to need meaningful relationships. Some things in life are too big to carry. But in a culture of fine, we are carrying things alone that we were never meant to carry by ourselves. Look at this passage in Galatians 6. Notice this phrase. Carry each other's burdens. That's another one another command. Okay, carry each other's burdens. And in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. Anyone thinks they are, if anyone thinks they are something when they are not, they deceive themselves. Each one should test their own actions, then they can take pride in themselves alone without comparing themselves to someone else. Listen to this statement. For each one should carry their own load. Now on the surface, it seems like a contradiction. Are we supposed to bear each other's burdens or am I supposed to man up and carry my own load? Which is it? It's a little lost in the English, but in the original language, when you read verse 2 where it talks about burden, the word means an extremely heavy, overwhelming burden. Bear those kinds of burdens with each other. Then down at the verse 5, when he says you carry your own load, the word for load there thinks is a much lighter, smaller load. Think of a backpack. So what Paul is saying here, don't be needy, don't be a leech. Toughen up and carry your load. But there are times when life puts on you more than what's supposed to be in a backpack and it starts breaking you and you can't carry that alone. That's what spiritual family is for. But sadly, we live in a culture that desires anonymity so badly, we don't look for help carrying our load until we've already broken under it. We need to be genuinely known. We have to be lovingly supported. And third, we need to be honestly challenged. And not just by a pastor speaking from a platform on Sunday, but in a one-on-one relationship or with a group of people, somebody has to be able to say, Brian, you embarrassed your wife in public in the way you responded to her in public. You disrespected her. Somebody has to say you were hateful to your kids. That kind of honest challenge can only come from people that know me, that have relational equity with me, people that I've given permission to get in my face and confront me with the tough stuff. Here's what we have to understand: confession isn't just for Catholics. In the Catholic tradition, they go to a priest, they confess their sin, he absolves their sin. In the Protestant tradition, we go directly to God through the person of Jesus Christ. Ask him, Will you forgive me? And he forgives our sins. But in the Bible, we're told to do both. Go to God and to others. James 5. Therefore, confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so you may be healed. The concept of confessing our sin to one another was easier back in the day when everybody was in a house church, there was no mobility, you couldn't hide, you had to be real. It was easier to be vulnerable. Today, it's easier to fake it and project and pretend, because we can hide, than it is for us to be honestly challenged. No, look, I don't share my sins and failures with everybody, but I have a group of people in my life that when I'm struggling with something, I can confess to them safely. When we confess our sins to God and others in our life who would be considered the safe zone, relationships where we are known, trusted, and supported, it removes shame. Shame is the number one tool of Satan's manipulation in your life. Theologically, I can know that I am forgiven by God. But what shame keeps saying to me, but if they knew the real you, they would not want to be in relationship with you. They would not love you. You shouldn't let everybody know what's in your closet, but a few people have to know, because only then can you experience the grace and forgiveness of God through those loving people, and God's mercy has flesh on it and it removes the shame. That's James 5:14. But that can't happen in a crowd. As we grow and reach more people for Christ, it gives us the opportunity to experience a level of kingdom impact that our church could never have had when it was smaller. But it also means we have to be more focused and more diligent than ever in finding ways to keep some of the things from the old neighborhood before the days of mobility. We can't become a crowd. That's my heart today. We can't be a crowd. We're trying to build something more than a crowd. We have to be members of his household. We're trying to build a spiritual family. That's why small groups matter so much here. Getting out of the rows and into circles. And it's why we're stepping into what we're stepping into next week, where I've preached the first introductory message in the mattering series. And then two weeks from today, we're going to have a group connect where you're going to have an opportunity to connect with a group within our catalog of small groups. And I'm challenging you, get in a group or lead a group. And if you want to lead a group outside the church at work in a neighborhood, a group of friends that don't come here, at group connect, we're going to have a place for you to go. We want to resource you. We want people in your life to find out they really matter and their life can have purpose. Over the next eight weeks, beginning next Sunday, this thing could change us as a church. We did this last year. It changed our church. And we're doing it again this year with a different topic. And I'm asking you to be a part and be involved. Some level of community can be found just about anywhere. But what we're inviting you into is something else. A people who are becoming the family of God together, being shaped into the image of Christ, not by accident, because it doesn't happen that way. It has to be done on purpose. And over the next eight weeks, we're going to find out what it means to live on purpose, to experience meaning and mattering and fulfillment. How do I experience that? And then how do I give it away? We can learn that in spiritual family, and it's worth fighting for. Sure, you can carry your own load when it's a backpack. But you may have come to church today and it's not a backpack anymore. Whatever you're going through, you're not fine. Okay? It's okay not to be fine. It's gotten too heavy for you. We're here to pray with you for those miracles in your life, those moments where you need that Galatians uh spiritual family to come along beside you to bear each other's burdens. This is not the end, it could be the beginning of feeling the support of a family and the love of God in that situation of your life. So, Lord, before we open these altars at every location, I just ask you to help get this in our spirit. I I want to keep reaching people for Jesus. I want to keep celebrating more baptisms, but God, I don't want to become a crowd. Help us, help us keep depth and life and formative discipling relationships as the priority. And it begins with these eight-week journeys throughout the year where we commit to inconvenience ourselves to do what we know the Bible says we need to do so we can grow and the family can grow and be strengthened by our presence. God, I pray for your church, your people. Will you bless them and keep them? Will you make your face shine down on them? Will you be gracious to them? Will you turn your countenance their direction? And today would you give them your peace in Jesus' name? Amen. These altars are open today. God bless.