The Meeting House Ottawa

Jenny Naismith Yandt shares a final teaching with our TMH Ottawa community before she goes on maternity leave for the next year.

Stephen Kidd shares the story of his journey of faith and what he's learned about loving people like Jesus.

What does it mean to be an intergenerational community where everyone, of all ages and stages, can both be discipled and disciple others? Eric helps us look to Deuteronomy 6 for some ideas on how we can be a community where all ages and stages are growing to be more like Jesus, together.

What would it look like for us to be a church community inspired by the church community in Acts 2? What kind of rhythm's could we build together that would form us to be like Jesus? What would it look like for us to be a community that held "everything in common"? Jenny takes us through these questions and more as we kick off our new ministry year.

Heather takes us through a look at 1 John 4: 1-21 and asks us to reconsider our understanding of false teaching, the Fruit of the Spirit and what it means for love to overcome fear.

Jenny Naismith Yandt continues our exploration of 1 John by offering some reflective thoughts on 1 John 2:15-29.

Discipleship is a word that gets used in church a lot but what does it really mean? Jesus told his followers to "go and make disciples". But how? Many of us have likely seen complex discipleship pathways, with multiple steps to be taken and likely a catchy hook to try and make the complex seem more simple. But does it have to be this way? In this teaching, Jenny helps us see the core essence of discipleship and gives us a simple framework for how we can be discipled and help others to be discipled as well.

Eric talks about how discipleship and spiritual growth happens best in a local, relational context and yet TMH successfully operated as a multi-site megachurch with centralized teaching and discipleship models for many years. Yet, what has worked in the past has been slowly becoming increasingly ineffective over the last decade and this decline of the model was steeply accelerated by both Covid and the sexual abuse findings in our church. So we cannot continue to do what we have always done, but what could be a potential way forward? What about instead of a mega-multi site church, we became a network of small, locally embedded churches that were part of a network family held together by shared values and shared resourcing and support structures. Would this position us to better be the church locally while being supported in some of the administrative and values keeping areas that take up so much time and energy in many smaller churches? We discuss all this and more as an "appetizer" to a more detailed local community conversation to come in June.

6 practical pieces of advice for how to better integrate spiritual practices in our daily routines as a means of establishing small, consistent rhythms that will help us become more like Jesus over our life time.  

Jenny take us through a in-depth reading of Romans 14 and then shares with us how spiritual practices have impacted her life positively.