Welcome to the start of a new series of notes to use in your Hub as we continue our journey together as a church. They accompany the Sunday morning messages and are to help you, as a Hub, to think, talk and pray through what we are learning together as a church family. We are starting with a big refocus on what is involved in Following Jesus Together. Over the next 2-3 months we will consider what we mean by Following.

1      Notes

It helps if you can listen to the Sunday message beforehand. If you missed it, there is always a recording online and we are going to try to make sure there is a blog post available summarising, or based on, the message. So that is also a way to catch up.

There was one message about what it means to follow Jesus, and you can read the post here. We use the explanation suggested by John Mark Comer. He suggests that followers of Jesus order and shape their lives around three priorities:

1. Being with Jesus
2. Becoming like Jesus
3. Doing what Jesus did (in his ways and works)

There was a second message about what it means to follow Jesus together, and the post for that is here. We affirm that, as a church, we are not about just drawing crowds but building a community – of disciples. There are many things about this but we started with these three. To follow Jesus together will mean:

1. We worship together – we gather together to worship, pray, hear God’s word and break bread
2. We walk together – we share the journey of life together
3. We work together – serving together is one of the best ways of growing together

2      Questions

We are going to be spending months and even years seeking to work out – in understanding and practice – what all this means, so don’t think you have to cover everything all at once. If it helps, here are some questions to start you off:

1. What might it look like for you to shape your life around what Comer suggests are the three priorities of followers?
2. How could we help one another in doing this if we are following together?
3. Looking at the three ways we suggest we can follow Jesus together, how might this work out in practice?
4. Can you think of any other ways in which we can follow Jesus together?

3      For Next Time:

In the next two messages and Hub Notes, we will be looking at how friendship with Jesus is at the heart of following him, and what it means to be disciple-making disciples.