STUDIO

This past Sunday, we explored what it means to own your journey as a follower of Jesus. Travis challenged us to move beyond passivity in our faith and to recognize that transformation of the mind, as described in Romans 12:2, is the foundation for Spirit-led action. We were reminded that ministry is not confined to what happens in the building. It happens in our workplaces, our marriages, our neighborhoods, and our daily decisions. God has not called us to sit on the sidelines. He has invited us to participate. As Travis put it, God has plans for you to make plans, and He has invited you to do so.

This week, we encourage you to spend time in the quiet, ask God what He is forming in you, and then take a faithful step in that direction. The weight of heaven is behind you.

For more info, you can go to our website, check us out on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. If you would like to support STUDIO financially, you can do so here.

Have a great week!

On Sunday we explored something that I believe is deeply connected to who we are as a community: the relationship between faith and creativity.

We began with a simple question: Why did God create humanity?

From Genesis to Hebrews 11, we explored how God invites us to participate in His creation and how faith gives us the courage to move toward a future we cannot yet see.

A few thoughts from Sunday:

• The line between faith and creating may be thinner than we realize.
• Faith invites us to act today without knowing what tomorrow will bring.
• What is worth creating even if we never live long enough to see what it becomes?

We love the idea that our lives can contribute to a story much bigger than ourselves. We ended with an invitation to resist cynicism and despair and become people who create with hope. Plant the seed. Write the song. Build the business. Make something beautiful.

For more info, you can go to our website, check us out on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. If you would like to support STUDIO financially, you can do so here.

Have a great week!

Studio, you are a dream, and we want to say thank you. Thank you for continuing to show up, lean in, and make gathering a priority in this season.

We greatly value gathering, whether in person or online. We believe there is something powerful that happens when we come together in worship, in conversation, in prayer, and simply in being with one another. The space may change, but our commitment to gathering together doesn’t.

When we look at STUDIO right now, we see something happening among us.

We are learning to see differently. We are becoming people of curiosity and wonder. We are learning to have difference without division. We are hungry for more of God.

We know that buildings matter. We believe there will be a day when God gives us an opportunity to put roots down somewhere in this city, and when that moment comes, we'll be ready.

But what we do know is that right now, God is continuing to build us.

So we lean in. We lean into God. We lean into each other. We lean into what He is doing among us.

For more info, you can go to our website, check us out on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. If you would like to support STUDIO financially, you can do so here.

Have a great week!

This Sunday, Pastor Eric continued the series of talks around the topic of unity. We often think unity is about changing someone else’s mind, resolving disagreement, or getting everyone on the same page, but Paul points us somewhere deeper:

“In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus.” Philippians 2:5

Unity requires more than agreeing with the idea of unity. It invites us to think like Jesus.

We talked about paying attention to the stories we tell ourselves about other people, especially when we've been hurt, disappointed, misunderstood, or offended.

A few ideas we explored:

• Unity isn't primarily about changing someone else's mind. It's allowing Christ to change the way I use mine.
• You cannot cultivate the Spirit of Unity without confronting the stories you tell yourself about other people.
• Humility reminds us, I might not have the whole story.
• Grace refuses to automatically assume the worst.
• The mind of Christ doesn't require us to deny what happened. It changes what we do with what happened.

Our hope is that we continue becoming a community marked by humility, grace, forgiveness, curiosity, and the beautiful mind of Christ.

For more info, you can go to our website, check us out on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. If you would like to support STUDIO financially, you can do so here.

Have a great week!

As we move into the new season, we come hungry for more of God - to commune with Him, and to step into all that He has for us. Last week we took time as a community, in prayer and fasting, to intentionally humble ourselves and seek the Lord. Before we move forward, we want to pause.

To seek His heart.

To get His perspective.

To hear what He is saying.

To surrender our will & plans and make room for His.

And that's what prayer does. Prayer is how we turn our hearts toward God.

In Matthew 7:7-11, Jesus gives us an incredible invitation. “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”

Jesus is teaching us that God is approachable. And then He gives us this picture: If your child asks you for bread, are you going to give them a stone? If they ask for a fish, are you going to give them a snake? And Jesus says: “How much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”

Prayer is not approaching a reluctant God. We're approaching a good Father. When God uses that name it comes with an invitation, it comes with great love, and access. It also requires us to know and trust who He is a good Father.

For us to commune and pray it requires trust. As we approach God, we come with all that we are, all that we need, and all that He is calling us into accessing God as a Father who loves us. We bring Him what we're carrying: Our needs. Our fears. Our questions. Our hopes. Our sickness. Our relationships. Our finances. Our future. And we say, “Father, I trust You with this.”

As we step into this new season we want to grow in participating in what God is inviting us into in prayer and be a responsive people.

The invitation is, what if we stopped praying safe prayers and came to God full of faith, courage and prayed audacious prayers? What would we ask God for?

For more info, you can go to our website, check us out on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. If you would like to support STUDIO financially, you can do so here.

Have a great week!

Last Sunday we continued our conversation around the Unity of the Spirit by asking a very practical question:

What happens when the people Jesus brings to the table don’t agree with each other?

Because unity would be easy if we all thought alike!

In Romans 14, Paul writes to a community navigating very real disagreements about faith, food, sacred days, traditions, and how to faithfully follow Jesus. And rather than telling everyone to simply agree, Paul gives them a radically different way to see one another.

A few ideas we explored:

• Unity of the Spirit, ask me to trust Jesus with people I disagree with.
• Don’t confuse different expressions of faithfulness with an absence of faithfulness.
• The person across from me is Christ’s servant, not mine.
• Jesus is capable of forming people whose convictions may be different from my own.
• Unity of the Spirit isn’t about making everyone at the table more like me. It’s about all of us belonging to Jesus.

Imagine a table filled with people from different generations, cultures, church traditions, economic realities, political perspectives, and life experiences.

And Jesus says, “You’re family.”

What a beautiful invitation.

What if the Church could become the place where our differences don’t have to disappear for love, belonging, humility, curiosity, and genuine relationship to flourish?

That’s the kind of community we want us to keep becoming.

For more info, you can go to our website, check us out on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. If you would like to support STUDIO financially, you can do so here.

Have a great week!

This past Sunday we explored something Paul writes about called the "unity of the Spirit," we learned he isn't talking about everyone thinking the same, looking the same, or sharing the same preferences.

He's describing something far more remarkable and dynamic.

The early church brought together people who, for centuries, would never have shared the same table. Different ethnicities. Different histories. Different traditions. Different ways of seeing the world.

Yet in Christ, God wasn't simply creating a better version of those divisions.

He was creating one new humanity.

Here are a few ideas we explored together:

• Biblical unity is not the absence of difference. It is the absence of hostility in the presence of difference because Christ has made us one.
• Unity isn't something we create. It's a reality Christ has already established that we are called to protect and preserve.
• Uniformity moves people toward me. Unity moves all of us toward Christ.
• The movement of unity isn't getting people to become more like us. It's moving together toward the new reality Christ has already created.

One of the applications that emerged from this passage is our vision of becoming a Home for Humanity. A community where people from different stories, backgrounds, perspectives, and seasons of life discover that Christ is greater than the things that have historically divided us.

For more info, you can go to our website, check us out on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. If you would like to support STUDIO financially, you can do so here.

Have a great week!

This past Sunday, we continued our series on Reading the Bible by exploring one of the most common mistakes we make when reading the letters of the New Testament:

We often extract a verse without understanding the conversation. When reading a letter, the invitation is different:

Don't just extract the verse. Understand the conversation between the writer and the reader.

We introduced a simple Letter Blueprint to help us read the New Testament letters more faithfully:

• Who is speaking, and who is listening?
• Why is this letter being written?
• What is the writer actually saying?
• What is timeless, and what is situational?
• How did this letter shape their lives, and how does it shape ours?

Then we put that framework into practice with one of the most quoted verses in the Bible:

"I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." (Philippians 4:13)

When we slow down and read the entire conversation instead of isolating one sentence, we discover that Paul isn't primarily talking about limitless achievement. He's writing about something even more profound:

If your fundamental identity is secured somewhere circumstances can't touch, your sufficiency doesn't have to be renegotiated every time your circumstances change.

One of the biggest takeaways from the morning was this:

Don't ask what a sentence means until you've listened to the conversation it's part of.

If you've ever wanted to move beyond reading verses in isolation and begin reading the Bible the way it was written, I think this message will be incredibly helpful.

For more info, you can go to our website, check us out on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. If you would like to support STUDIO financially, you can do so here.

Have a great week!

This week we continued our series on reading the Bible, focusing on how to read the New Testament letters. We learned that when we read books like Philippians, Corinthians, Romans, or Peter’s letters, we are essentially “reading someone else’s mail”. These letters were written by real leaders to real churches in real situations, helping believers learn how to live under the new covenant.

The message introduced a simple framework for reading biblical letters:

1. “Who is speaking, and who is listening?”

2. “Why is this letter being written?”

3. “What is the writer saying?”

4. “What is timeless, and what is situational?”

5. “How did this letter affect their lives, and how does it affect ours?”

As we look at Paul’s relationship with the Philippian church, we discover a letter shaped by partnership, love, suffering, generosity, and encouragement. He had a deep relationship with the Philippian church. They were not just people he taught; they were partners with him. They supported him financially and cared for him when others did not.

Our challenge this week is to read Philippians slowly and thoughtfully, allowing Scripture to become not just a daily task, but a lifelong relationship. Our invitation is to move from reading Scripture as a checklist, to engaging it as a lifelong relationship. Instead of focusing on speed or quantity, we are being invited into depth, patience, and discovery.

For more info, you can go to our website, check us out on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. If you would like to support STUDIO financially, you can do so here.

Have a great week!

This past Sunday we continued our series on reading the Bible with a familiar story: David and Goliath.

Most of us know the story.

David. Goliath. Five stones. A sling. A giant falls.

But what if there’s more to the story?

One of the challenges of reading biblical narrative is that we naturally want to turn every story into a lesson, principle, or list of things we should do. But narrative often works differently. Sometimes the details we focus on aren’t actually the point.

So we introduced a simple Narrative Blueprint—five questions that can help us slow down and enter the story more faithfully:

• Who is the narrator favoring?
• What bigger story does this scene sit inside?
• What is being reported versus commanded?
• What patterns have we seen elsewhere in Scripture?
• Where is the story ultimately pointing?

As we walked through these questions together, one of the Bible's most familiar stories began to unfold in a fresh way. We discovered that David and Goliath may be inviting us to ask a deeper question than simply: "What's your giant?"

Because David himself tells us the theological center of the story: “The battle is the Lord’s.”

The Bible is full of stories we may have heard our entire lives—and there is still more to see.

For more info, you can go to our website, check us out on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. If you would like to support STUDIO financially, you can do so here.

Have a great week!