There is an ancient Greek aphorism used by Socrates and many others that came after him, including St. Augustine of Hippo and “the Oracle” from The Matrix movies. Temet nosce is the Latin. In English, it’s “know thyself.” It’s easy to go through the day-to-day routine of life, get stuff done and never take the time to assess one’s self. You can do the same thing in an organization. It’s easy to go from week to week in church life without ever stopping to ask questions like: What makes us who we are? Why do we do the things we do? What are we shooting for? You can get from week to week without asking these questions, but that’s about all you can do. It’s tough to progress as an organization without having a clear picture of who we are and what we do.
For the last several months, church council has been working on putting some answers together for these questions. These practices are “what we’re made of” so to speak; they form the basic building blocks of our community of faith. Church council created the list. For the next seven weeks I’ll be expounding on each practice in a sermon. Specifically, I’ll be looking at the biblical basis for carrying out these practices. This week we’re discussing worship and reading the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4. What can we learn from Jesus’ interaction with this woman?