WestGate Church Teaching

Once a year, on the final week of Compassion Immersion, we take some time as a church to highlight the work of a Christian missionary whose impact can be felt down through the pages of history. This year, we look at the very first Protestant missionary sent from North America: Adoniram Judson - specifically the role his spouses played. Judson was married three times, losing his wives to disease one after another as they served the people of Burma. From the linguistic brilliance and toughness of Ann, to Sarah’s extraordinary ability to run highly effective schools, to Emily’s writing ability, each contributed to the growth and success of the Burmese church. And their lives, filled with hardship and loss, also shine as an example of what it means of holistic, sacrificial love for others. In the words of Jim Elliot, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

SPEAKERS:

Steve Clifford (Saratoga), David Tieche (South Hills)

One of the core values of WestGate Church is a direct command by Jesus to “love your neighbor as yourself.” This week, Keivan Tehrani, our Global Compassion pastor, stops by to explain why this extends to the entire globe. And even though it’s easy to get quickly overwhelmed at the magnitude of the brokenenss of the world and the desperate need of so many, Keivan shows that it’s faithfulness in little, everyday ways - with your life - that God can use to make a real difference to show the world that God is good in a world that’s sometimes very bad.

It’s easy to get quickly overwhelmed at the magnitude of the brokenenss of the world and the desperate need of millions of people. And as people living in the Bay Area, it’s also easy to quickly turn myopic, focusing only on what’s going on in *my* life. Keivan Tehrani and Ryan Brailler from our Global Compassion Team stop by to share some incredible stories of ways they’ve seen God at work across the globe. Keivan also shares his story as a refugee from war-torn Iran, and why he thinks compassion is not only a non-optional part of what it means for a church and a Christian to be faithful to Jesus, but one of the strongest apologetics for God in a dark world.

Speakers: David Tieche + Keivan Tehrani + Ryan Braillier

For the next three weeks, we’ll be in a sermon series called Compassion Immersion. But why compassion? Finny Abraham and Lily Weirich, both of whom work in the area of Local Compassion for WestGate Church, stop by to talk about this. They explain why works of compassion aren’t really optional for following Jesus, and how compassion demonstrates what Jesus is really like to a world that’s hurting. They also share stories of transformation they’ve seen in this past season. And speaking of changing lives, Finny also reveals how many diapers he goes through with a pair of baby twins at home.

Speakers: David Tieche + Finny Abraham + Lily Weirich

In John 4, we see Jesus approach a woman who many in the orthodox Jewish community would have avoided. There were all sorts of barriers that would have prevented an Orthodox Jewish people from conversing with her: barriers around gender, race, religion and morality. Jesus’ interaction with this woman shows not only an incredible posture of grace and kindness, but also an invitation to capital T-Truth, where Jesus invites her to drink of “living water” found in…Him. And as the story shows, this duality of both 1. the correct Christlike posture, coupled with 2. the bold proclamation that Jesus is Truth was utterly transformative for this woman. And it’s a model of interaction that we modern Christians can emulate, too.

For Christians, the Bible isn’t nice to have, it’s vital. Central. Christians believe that the Bible is not just a book, but the divinely inspired Word of God, spoken for us, to lead us in the way of truth and love, down the path toward God’s glory and our good. But it isn’t about intellectual ascent; it’s about transformation. And we find, in the Bible, that the Word of God is referred to as a number of things: it’s bread (life-giving, necessary to our selves for life), a lamp (guides our path in a world that’s dark, a sword (protects us in a world where we’re under assault from lies that assail us) and a scalpel (it does surgery on us to heal us).

SPEAKERS:

Jay Kim (Saratoga), Corinna Girard (South Hills)

For generations and millennia, Christians have believed that the Bible was the very Word of God. But what does it look like, practically, for us to take the Bible seriously as God’s people? How can we do that? And how do we handle the elephant in the room for many people: that Jesus is great, but the Bible is antiquated, out-dated (and has been used as a prop for anti-science, racist and sexist movements). Jay Kim stops by to chat about that and Seattle pastor and friend-of-David Stanley Markowski shares practical ways and some best practices for ways the Bible has transformed people in his part of the country.

Speakers: David Tieche + Jay Kim + Stanley Markowski

This past weekend, we made the case that we need silence in our lives to overcome the loud, noisy distracting world in order to hear God. But that raises a point: if the world is noisy, and God wants our attention, why doesn’t He just shout? Break into our lives like the Kool-Aid man crashing through your house. That would do it, wouldn’t it? Why is silence necessary for us to connect with God? Why does the Psalmist talk to his “soul” as if it’s a different part of him? When we’re silent, is it to find out more about ourselves, or God? Or both? What if you’re easily distracted (even in silence) and your brain starts humming 90s music? Does that count? Is that praying? And what role does the Bible play in silence and connecting with God?

We live in a noisy world. We are inundated with noise pollution in our everyday lives. Because of population, technology, and industrialization, our world is literally louder than it’s ever been. But beyond auditory sound, and maybe more dangerously, we live with an alarming noisiness in our mental, emotional, spiritual lives. Amid the distraction of noise, what we most need is silence. We often lack resilience because we can’t hear God, and as a result, lack clarity, courage, and confidence. But we often fail to hear God, not because he isn’t speaking. We fail to hear God because we (like Elijah in the famous story in 1 Kings) expect Him to speak like a roaring wind, a thundering earthquake, or a blazing fire. We fail to hear God because there’s too much noise and our ears are unattuned to the gentle whisper. But if we do take the time to really listen - to quiet ourselves and our noisy world - we can find that God is still speaking.

This past weekend, we put forth a hypothesis that a lot of conflict in our lives is a direct result of a lack of humility. This week, Steve Clifford and Andy Barron join David to talk about the social science behind conflict – and why humility is the path forward in every case. We also examine the work of scholars Edwin Judge and John Dickson’s who studied ancient history to find out how humility - which was despised by the Romans and the Greeks - became a virtue in Western Civilization. We also talk about ways to cultivate humility – which is perhaps something no one *wants* to do, but everyone *needs* to do.