City Collective Podcast

This week Pastor Jason brought us an awesome and real word on love and relationships. With Valentine’s Day coming up, and just in life, we tend to spend a lot of time thinking about relationships and our relationship status. Relationships are awesome but sometimes we place our relationship status with others over our relationship status with God. Ps Jason challenged us with the idea of taking the priority of identity off our relationships with others and placing it on our relationship with God.

What a weekend!! Baby dedications and baptisms made for an incredible morning and we are so grateful to have been apart of it!This week, we wrapped up our first series of 2020, entitled LONELY, and Pastor Jason brought us a message asking “In a life in which God promises us peace and invited us to experience joy, I am left with the question… Why am I anxious?” We dove into what is the difference between fear and anxiety, the reality of mental health issues, and why we need to bring our fears to God so that he can bring strength into our weakness.

Intimacy is hard. This week, we kicked off our Lonely series with Guest Preachers Neil and Sharol Josephson. Lonely is all about loneliness and mental health and Neil and Sharol kicked us off by speaking on the topics of intimacy and sex. They challenged us with what it looks like to be intimate with God and others and equipped us with some tools to help grow that intimacy.

These are our essentials. worship. This week Ps. Jason Charles unpacked what makes worship essential in our lives.

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This week Pastor Jason talked about the Apostle Paul and how even though he got a new start on the road to Damascus, It was really just the beginning of His Journey.

What a Sunday!! We got to hear from 5 of our Collective Team Members (Becca, Audry, Benji, Jenn, and Anthony). We gave each of them 5 minutes to preach on the same passage (Romans 5:1-11), and we couldn’t be prouder and more inspired!

We were so excited to have Pastor Nic Arkley join us this past Sunday. Pastor Nic, his wife Sarah, and their two kids, recently moved to Vancouver to plant a new life giving church. This past Sunday, Nic talked about six words in the book of Luke that changed his life and just might change yours.

Have you ever found yourself in a wilderness of some sort. Relational, spiritual, emotional dryness that has been frustrating to navigate through. The story of Jesus in Luke 4 tells of his experience of the wilderness as well but also resonates with the element which often causes us to feel that way: CHANGE. This week Pastor Jason talks about the Tension in the Transition and how the story of Jesus reminds us of the opportunity within it.

This past Sunday we loved having Pastor Shanda Millar from Horizon Church sharing with our community. She opened up our two week series on the Wilderness and the journey that Jesus finds himself on in Luke 4. It was a powerful morning that we hope encourages you today!

We reached the final week of our Throwdown in Torah as Jacob is brought face to face with his brother Esau. 20 years have passed and Jacob is a changed man. However, the last moment he shared with his brother remains the lasting memory of who he believes his brother to be but it is clear that just as Jacob has changed so has Esau. A journey of hurt and mistakes comes together as we see how God is at work in all of our stories and just as our mistakes are not meant to define us, neither are our hurts. Forgiveness, reconciliation and the hurts we live with lead us to know God as we wrap up our journey with Jacob this week. Check it out!

This past Sunday we reached the namesake story of our series in Genesis 32 as we find Jacob wrestling with God. Heartache, betrayal, deception and running all have seemingly been common themes in Jacob’s life up to this point and yet in this moment where it seems like he is about to face the consequences for a lifetime of poor decisions God meets him. And not from the sky or in the distance but in the most intimate of ways choosing to wrestle with Jacob for as long as it takes. We see a man much like ourselves in need of a moment with God where we wrestle not to display our strength but to reveal weakness. Wrestling, name changes and the continued fulfillment of a promise. Join us this week as we continue with Jacob!

We all have Bethel’s in our life, these moments that change the trajectory of our lives. Jacob has a moment like this and then experience some pretty extreme family drama. But for the first time instead of being met with anger from his Uncle his met with forgiveness. Pastor Neil considered it all this week from unresolved generational family strife to fear of rejection and ultimately searching for an identity more than our decisions might dictate.

Are there moments in your life that you just aren’t yourself? We often think this is a behaviour issue but God leads us to see it is a source issue. Our continued story of Jacob reveals that his pitstop in Bethel was more than a moment where God met him, but it was a moment where God changed him. His actions that followed in the years that followed paint the story of a different man than the one at the beginning. Pastor Jason asks the question - what changed? And what needs to change for us if we are to truly walk in our purpose in life. Our journey of faith is more than moments that inspire us, rather they are moments when God transforms us.

What are you willing to do to achieve your destiny? And what lengths are you willing to go to when you believe that it is a God-given destiny? This is the question we see Rebekah confronted with in the story of Jacob. As he continues to covet the life of his brother Esau. In a culture that is fascinated with the success of others we can relate with the drive behind Jacob’s actions. Desiring the success of others as our own never seems to be enough. Pastor Jason dives into how our path towards our destiny matters even more than the destination we think we are called to.

Have you ever made a bad trade? In many ways the story of Jacob and Esau seems ridiculous. A hungry brother, a bowl of red stew, and the trading of a birthright don’t seem to make much rational sense but yet this is our story today. In a world of instant gratification we are constantly find our rationality and our need for a quick fix at odds with one another. Money, Sex, Power and so many other areas seem to lead to some bad trades. In part two of our series on Jacob we see a warning against giving up what we want most for what we want now. But also a incredible example of grace at work even when we make a poor decision.

It can often feel like we are simply passengers in the grand story of life. Situations happen, conflict hurts, and our story seems like it is moving quicker than you can respond. In this first week of our journey with Jacob we see how the story seems predetermined for so many of the characters but God is revealed over and over. We dive into the idea of perhaps our journey being important than our pursuit of God, and how God is actually the one in constant pursuit of you.

In the final week of our series on RHYTHMS we talked about the idea of play. If work is about our participation in the ongoing creation of the world around us, and rest is about our intentional stepping away from productivity being our source of value. Then Play is about investing ourselves in a completely different type of outcome. C.S. Lewis said that the greatest thing that the Psalms did for him was express the joy that made David dance. A rhythm of play is a response to the hurt and suffering we see in the world around us. That joy is stronger than grief, that hope is more powerful than pain, that the grace of Jesus is more than we could ever imagine. PLAY is the RHYTHM of our life where we most experience generosity as it is meant to be given. Unconditional, without personal benefit and from a place of love. A Jesus Life. This is the idea we uncover this week!

As a church we believe deeply in the need and importance of women within our community. Not simply as a bystander but as leaders, pastors, preachers and care givers of our community. For too long the church was negligent in identifying and celebrating the beauty and importance of woman within our faith. We are missing the fullness and beauty offered to us through Jesus when we do not include or listen to the voices of the women in our lives. So in today’s sermon we recognize the incredible story of redemption and restoration in the life of Ruth and how the most common and mundane moments of our lives create space for God to operate in power.

A large portion of our life is committed to the idea of rest but in many ways we treat it as a space of recovery or simply resent how we aren’t being productive in the midst of it. From the very beginning God introduces and models the idea of rest and then invites the Israelites to include it in the rhythms of their lives as well. Rest however, was always about more than simply being a space between moments of work. Rest was always intended to be holy. Why is that important? That is the question we ask this week.

The manner in which we talk about work and treat our work environments and our faith experiences feels very much like a picky eater who doesn’t want their food touch for fear that one will be tainted by the other. Let’s work really hard for majority of our lives so that maybe if we are lucky and save well one day we can not work for a small part of our lives before we die. That isn’t the story of work in the imagination of God though. From the very beginning work was designed by God to be more than something to survive in. What would happen if we had a shift in our thinking about our work and careers and began to view it as God does?

What compels our actions, our thoughts and our interactions. Research shows that though there is a clear growing trend towards isolation in terms of the usage of our time, it still functions from a desire for connection and relationship. Pastor Jason explores the cravings we have as humans and the heart that Jesus has for us. The idea of the resurrection can be challenging for us in our finite perspective but there is an incredible hope to discover in the desire driving Jesus’ path to the cross. His resurrection is a celebration of His victory over death, but what does that mean for us in the here and now? We explore that conversation this Easter Sunday.

Have you ever been left disappointed? We all have. It is part of being human and something that we often don’t know what to do with. Do we withdraw from it? Do we engage with it? Do we ignore it? With the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem we see a crowd welcoming a conquering king. His arrival was an illustration of God’s deep commitment to them but yet Jesus’ week that followed didn’t check all the boxes they had in mind. Soon their cries of Hosanna changed to Crucify Him. Disappointment became the cry of their hearts. You may have been disappointed. You may have been hurt. But the story of Jesus is that God will catch and can handle the full weight of your life. It just might not be in the exact way that you expect. We explore this conversation of disappointment on Palm Sunday and how Jesus doesn’t always arrive as we anticipate.

One of the most shocking findings of Brene Brown’s work is the idea that the most compassionate people she had interviewed were actually the most boundaried. A definition of boundaries is simply what is ok and what is not ok. What we do is not set boundaries. In our talk this week we had talked the necessity and power of boundaries in our process of forgiveness. If revenge is our default what is Jesus saying in Matthew 5 when he says to turn the other cheek? Is he asking us to have a passive faith or is there more to it. Pastor Jason led us to this final thought:“So my prayer today as we close this conversation on forgiveness is that you recognize that you are worthy of more than the way you have been mistreated. But that you can reclaim your respect, autonomy and dignity through forgivness and non-vioence without using revenge and bitterness. That you know you need healthy boundaries in your life not simply to protect yourself but to forgive well, to live well and to love from a place of overflow. May your face the future with a renewed imagination of what is healthy for you. With hope for the day that you might be free of those things you thought would be with you forever.”

Revenge is sweet. Have you heard that before? Sure we can believe that about others but are we aware of how true that is for ourselves. Revenge is one of the most negative outcomes of hurt in our lives and whether we are aware of it or not, we are all guilty of it. Perhaps not in the big dramatic ways that we associate with the word but in a cold shoulder to a word spoken against you, a spark of gossip when you feel rejected, the silent treatment when things don’t go your way. In order for us to move to a place of reconciliation as Jesus desires for all of us, we need to understand what revenge is and how we can diffuse it. Pastor Jason opens up the story of Samson for us this week as we consider where revenge leads us and what Jesus wants for us.

Forgiveness is difficult. C.S. Lewis gets it when he says that “Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.” There is a difficult reality that we are faced with when it comes to forgiveness. That forgiveness means not getting even, it means it won’t ever be made fair, it means that you won’t get to enact all of those elaborate revenge fantasies that you have been constructing in the back of your mind somewhere. So we began this journey together by looking at what forgiveness isn’t. We reflected on what Jesus has to say in Matthew 18:21-35 and what it means for us today. Pastor Jason noted that Peter’s question of number had less to do with the number and more to do with the heart. To often when we are asking when my forgiveness is enough, is really asking at what point is revenge acceptable. There are three areas we looked it:Forgiveness isn’t a FeelingForgiveness isn’t ForgettingForgiveness isn’t For ThemAll three led us to a simple foundation to our month long conversation - Forgiveness is a choice to begin the process of healing. Forgiveness is the death of a debt.- We are excited to continue into Part 2 of the series next week as we talk about FORGIVING YOURSELF -

For many of us true freedom doesn’t feel familiar and we would rather stay in something that enslaves us that is predictable rather than embrace something that is new, and good and true, and pure.So we will go back to familiar mindsets, we will go back to familiar toxic emotional states because it feels normal to us. And we will choose normal over new. And just because it is normal doesn’t mean that it is right.It’s not hard for God to bring you into freedom, the hard part is teaching us to live in it. “You lose your power to love others when all you are trying to do is fulfill the law for yourself.”—We start our new series The F-Word this upcoming Sunday on all things Forgiveness! Service gets going at 10:30am

We continued with our series “Church Clothes” this weekend, as Pastor Jason continued into Galatians 3. We looked at the impact of our past on our current understanding and experience of grace. And how Paul invites the Galatians to live with no separation between them to not be against one another but know that they are all unified in Christ. Are we living from a place of what we are for? Or from what we are against?——Next week is our SERVE Sunday so come ready to join us in loving on our community. So make plans to stick around after service. Lunch is on us!

We continued with our series “Church Clothes” this weekend, as Pastor Jason continued into Galatians 2. We looked at what graceful confrontation really looks like, and the value propositions we are faced with everyday indicating where our priorities truly lie. Are we pursuing a lifestyle of comfort or God’s calling?——Next week right after service we are having a Meet, Eat and Greet after church lunch. This is one of the best ways to get to know some of the amazing people that make up City Collective. So make plans to stick around after service. Lunch is on us!

This past Sunday was the beginning of our new series Church Clothes as Pastor Jason walks us through the book of Galatians. Are we living a life out of grace or for grace? Have we overcomplicated a simple truth through qualifications in our faith? Why is a simple grace so difficult to understand and grab onto?——Next week right after service we are having a City Collective Info Session where we take 15 Minutes with Pastor Jason to paint a picture of all the different things happening at the church and hopefully answer some questions along the way. If you are interested in learning more about the church this is a great opportunity! Snacks will be provided.

We had a fantastic morning with guest speaker Daniel Whitehead from Sanctuary Mental Health Ministries! He spoke out of Psalm 130 for the last instalment of the Sunshine & Shadows series. He said, "The pursuit of happiness is not the Christian ideal ... joy is a part of our walk in faith, but happiness is not the primary pursuit." ———His prayer for the church was this: God save us from listening to testimonies from people only once they are well. God save us from being people who need neat and tidy concepts. In the depths of darkness, let us discover the depth of God's love.

We had an incredible Sunday with voices from the health and counselling community speaking into the area of mental health! Food, friends and family made for a morning of honest conversations and new friendships. Thank you to our panelists for speaking so well into the subject!

This Sunday we launched a new series called Sunshine & Shadows: A Conversation about Mental Health. Pastor Jason talked about the power of perception in our understanding of it and the opportunity of the church to be a place of hope in the reality of its weight in our society. Moving from a place of comfortable to vulnerable, from a mindset of curing to healing, and from a posture of inclusivity to belonging. Tacos, Legolas, Mental Health facts and the Bible made for an incredible Sunday! #SunshineandShadows ———We have workshops at Trinity Western House next week and a panel conversation happening this upcoming Sunday that you don’t want to miss. And make plans to stick around after church for our first Eat, Meet & Greet (after-church lunch) of 2019 right after service! Join us Sunday, 10:30am @ H.D. Stafford Middle School

This Sunday we explored the journey of Peter through John 13 and John 21 considering how we see each moment in a culture of instant gratification and how Jesus views the world with a wider context. Instant gratification has become the norm for us but often prevents us from seeing the grander story that God is working in the world around us. Pastor Jason considered how the journey Peter went on prepared him to respond and receive the love that Jesus had for him on that beach after the resurrection and what that means for our story today. #ItWasASetup———We have community groups happening throughout Langley starting this week and the start of our lunch program serving at H.D. Stafford this Friday @ 10:45am.Next week we start our new series: SUNSHINE & SHADOWS - A Conversation Around Mental Health. Join us Sunday, 10:30am @ H.D. Stafford Middle School

Week 3 from our Series: Advent

This past Sunday we looked at the possibility found in an unexpected interruption. And how sometimes the best answer to an interruption is a simple response of yes.

Week 1 of our Series: Advent

Ps Neil and Sharol Josephson from Family Life Canada share their thoughts on Relationships

A unique take on David and Goliath

Week 6 of our collection of talks studying significant moments Jesus had around the dinner table.

Who am I comparing and measuring myself against? This is a struggle we all encounter. Where we are so worried about the person on our right and our left that we are unable to be content. In Luke 22 Jesus is interrupted in his final discourse by a dispute of comparison and greatness amongst the disciples - and in a moment when they were invited into communion they fell into comparison.Continuing with a collection of talks called Table Talks, Pastor Jason dives into the Gospel of Luke. Robert Karris lists no less than 51 passages related to eating and drinking and states that the considerable truth of Luke’s Gospel is that - Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal. There is something to significant that happens every time - so each week we are considering what Jesus has to teach us about himself, about each of us and what that means for us today.This week, Pastor Jason took us to Luke 22 and the story of The Last Supper. And challenged us to consider how comparison has robbed us of the invitation of communion in our own lives. God wants you to be great, but great by his definition. As the one who serves, not just the one who sits. So he will place opportunities in your life to be great – to serve, to love, to sacrifice – and the question we are left with is: will we be so caught up in our comparison that will miss our moments of communion?We then had the opportunity to take part in communion at the end of our time together that morning. Great conversations continued into the foyer and everyone went off to enjoy some sunshine!Check out the podcast and photos below, and make plans to join us this Sunday for Baptism Sunday and our final week of Table Talks! Community Groups are happening as well all week. You can find more information on these HERETo subscribe to the sermon podcast click HERE Sunday Set List OvercomeO Come to the AltarN