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[[http://www.jesusnetwork.eu/de/doku.php/jn_de_2011_01_11|Deutsche Version]] [[Start|| Wiki Start]]
[[topics_collection_iii|| Topics Collection iii ]]
======Goals! Building the Community ...======
Tuesday, Jan 11, 2011. Let us talk about our community for a moment.
We want to build community. We all need community and only when the
environment in which we live works well, we can prosper ourselves.
Building our local and our national community is, thus, a vital task
which we need to have as one of our key goals.
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**What type of Community on what level? ...**
But what type of community do we need? What community do we aim for?
Building community has various layers and levels.
There is the legal aspect of community,
security and the reliability of contracts and behaviour. There is the
aspect of finances, of taxes, of public services and institutions.
Community has a business aspect. We form business units, eiter small
ones, where the smallest unit is the single craftsman or service
worker. There are larger structures up to some global enterprise, where
thousands of people belong to one big firm. All of them have their
ways to work, their needs and strength. Building an environment, in wich
all of this work, is part of community building.
And last but not least there are the relationships between people. What
type of relationships do we have - the range is large from partnership
between a man and a woman up to colleagues, business partners, friends
and other people in my church.
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**Community with God ...**
The biblical approach to community building puts a key ingredient into
our discussion. It all starts with our relationship to God. The bible
wants to put our relationship to the eternal God first. As the first
command it tells us to love God with all our heart, with all our strength
and all we have and are. It puts everything else into a second place.
All other relationships will be developed from our relationship to
God. Here, with the Lord, we get strength, we receive love, we are in a
large and free space of acceptance. The Lord loves us and accepts us as
we are. He also corrects our behaviour. He is completely true with us,
he does not tell us things just to please us, but he tells us what is
true. He knows us completely, and he still accepts us in and through
Jesus. Community with God is one of the central ideas of Christian
faith.
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