The Rewards and The Costs of Cultivating A Safe But Not Soft Community.

The vision of the church is to cultivate a safe and authentic community that brings believers into discipleship. What makes an authentic community hard to achieve is our tendency to hide from our own faults and failures, which is behavior that stems from the brokenness of original sin. If the cost of an authentic community is our discomfort in the acts of sharing our pain and striving towards greater accountability, then why build the discipline of Christian community? As shown by the exchange between Peter and Jesus after the Resurrection, the discomfort of living in an authentic community allows us to grow and flourish as God meant for us to - because we can be intimate enough to confess our sins and journeys towards repentance.