We are using water as a metaphor for community and here’s why… with water we are baptized into community. Water gives life just as it cleanses and renews. Together we form streams of living water and offer love and hope to a spiritually thirsty world.

The above description is summary on the info cards that we’ve printed up, but the symbolism goes much deeper. There is a theme that runs throughout God’s word about ‘living water’ or, the ‘river of life’. Jesus references it when he tells the women at the well about ’springs of living water’. Paul speaks of it when he talks about baptism in his epistles.  Erwin Mcmanus describes the way that baptism forms community in this way:

Every believer passes through the waters and becomes a part of the river of life. Alone, you are only standing in a puddle. Together we become an oasis where those searching for genuine love and acceptance can come and drink deeply.

Almost everyone we’ve ever met has a desire to connect on a spiritual level with something larger then himself or herself. Most are unable to articulate how or why but they feel it in their bones. It’s just the way we we’re created. However, our culture is constantly telling us that the material world (the world that we can see and touch and feel) is all there is to life. Culture is telling you and I that we are alone and we best get used to it and learn how to cope. This makes for a whole lot of people wandering and groping in a spiritual desert. They have a deep thirst for spiritual connection but find nothing to drink.

Jesus said that if we ask, he would create in us a spring of living water welling up to eternal life. The community that follows Jesus is the oasis of God. Together, we are the place of love where a thirsty world can come and drink deeply.