Family.
A word that can conjure up both joy and anguish at the same time. A word that means unconditional acceptance at the best of times, and rejection at the worst. We realise not everyone has a purely positive association with the idea of the “family of God”.
So then why “As Family We Go”? Why bring family into it at all? Why is that controversial little word even necessary?
The answer is simply that it’s what God calls us. He calls us his sons and daughters, and calls himself our Father. We’re his people, the heirs of his inheritance. The family of God is an unlikely and wildly diverse group of people bound by Blood, and committed to pushing through the frustrations and joys of what it is to be messy, sinful humans.
Today as a band we’re launching a ministry movement we’ve called As Family We Go. It’s a network of churches, house groups, Bible studies, and faith communities who’ve partnered together despite their differences, around the united cause of championing the Gospel in their own immediate contexts. It’s a community of communities who have a passion to reach the world for Jesus. It’s a network for the ones who are committed to this idea of family. A collection of leaders and pioneers in the missional landscape of God’s kingdom. And even though the communities that make up As Family We Go are scattered across the world, we all gather around one heartbeat and desire to see no one goes uninvited into the family of God.
We’re all different, but united. Whether it’s crafting community among artists in Dublin, or serving and reaching out to immigrant families in Atlanta, or reaching the homeless in Pennsylvania, we’re coming together to paint a broader picture of what it looks like to be a part of the family of God. In order to grow as a family we must never stop looking for those on the outskirts, the ones wanting to be brought in, the ones who need to know it’s okay to have questions, doubts, cynicism and fear. If we’re going to seek the one lost, we need to be willing to leave the ninety-nine.
We aren’t anyone special, just a community trying to love like Jesus. We’re just a family offering the world somewhere to belong.
These next few months we’ll be travelling on tour. But we’ll also be meeting with church pastors, community leaders, kindred folk with the same heartbeat for reaching the world with the Gospel. We want to meet and share stories of hope, of camaraderie, of what God’s doing in the lives of the people around us. We want to pray together and ask for God’s kingdom to come here on earth.
We’d love for you to join us on this journey and introduce you to the people we meet along the way, and you can do that at www.asfamilywego.com, where we’ll be sharing stories, videos, and resources we gather along the way.
