Spark Cast

This weekend Spark Church hosted Mark Yaconelli, speaker, author, and Executive Director of The Hearth, a local storytelling community welcoming people of all different spiritual backgrounds and journeys. Mark's most recent book, "Between The Listening And The Telling" is a beautiful journey of adventure, hope, longing, and mystery that invites us to all embrace our own stories as the way through which we find salvation. This weekend we were immersed in this ancient practice and compelled to revisit and remember the same God, Jesus, and Spirit that has been co-authoring our stories with us since the very beginning.

This weekend Spark Church hosted Mark Yaconelli, speaker, author, and Executive Director of The Hearth, a local storytelling community welcoming people of all different spiritual backgrounds and journeys. Mark's most recent book, "Between The Listening And The Telling" is a beautiful journey of adventure, hope, longing, and mystery that invites us to all embrace our own stories as the way through which we find salvation. This weekend we were immersed in this ancient practice and compelled to revisit and remember the same God, Jesus, and Spirit that has been co-authoring our stories with us since the very beginning.

This weekend Spark Church hosted Mark Yaconelli, speaker, author, and Executive Director of The Hearth, a local storytelling community welcoming people of all different spiritual backgrounds and journeys. Mark's most recent book, "Between The Listening And The Telling" is a beautiful journey of adventure, hope, longing, and mystery that invites us to all embrace our own stories as the way through which we find salvation. This weekend we were immersed in this ancient practice and compelled to revisit and remember the same God, Jesus, and Spirit that has been co-authoring our stories with us since the very beginning.

This weekend Spark Church hosted Mark Yaconelli, speaker, author, and Executive Director of The Hearth, a local storytelling community welcoming people of all different spiritual backgrounds and journeys. Mark's most recent book, "Between The Listening And The Telling" is a beautiful journey of adventure, hope, longing, and mystery that invites us to all embrace our own stories as the way through which we find salvation. This weekend we were immersed in this ancient practice and compelled to revisit and remember the same God, Jesus, and Spirit that has been co-authoring our stories with us since the very beginning.

From the beginning of our Bible, to the end, we hear of divine encounters. These spiritual revelations, conversations, miraculous deliverances, quiet whispers, and silences describe holy moments between God and people. What does this mean for us today and how do we live into the truth of Jesus' promise to make His home with us and be with us always?

On this eleventh anniversary of Spark, we share the vision and strategic plan for the life of our church.

We've been talking for weeks now about Jesus' "sheep" and the loving mercy that defines followers of Jesus. But to the "goats", Jesus says, "Depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels... then they will go into eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life." Those are... high stakes! We end of our series in Matthew 25 by talking through Jesus' apocalyptic warning to his disciples and how we can heed that warning today.

Who are the poor? Who are the least of these? And how might we truly tune our hearts to Jesus' presence in our midst?

Poverty is a problem here in America and around the world. So, as Christians, what do we do? Some people throw their hands up because solving this problem, ending poverty, seems way too ambitious and impossibly expensive. And Jesus is even quoted in the Bible as saying that ‘the poor will always be with you.” But when we read the Bible, from Genesis throughout the New Testament, we see a constant revelation of God’s will that no one should be made hungry, sick, homeless, underpaid, indebted, or bereft by the violence of social injustice. God’s intention is that abundance should be a blessing for all.

“The least of these” has been understood to be the marginalized, the disenfranchised, and the ostracized, those who have been slighted or forgotten by society. But in this passage, they are called “my family.” This is both an identity statement and a profound shift of perspective. What you do for those who are on the margins of society is different from what you would do for your family. And if we can change our worldview, we can change the world viewed.