A place where I have laughed, cried and tried to pick up dates...

Northwest Fellowship has been a place where I have laughed, cried, tried (unsuccessfully) to pick up dates, and a place where I have just come to sit and stare at the wall.

I once thought church was about getting all dressed up, sitting for 3 hours in a hot sweaty building, listening to a sermon, hearing a choir sing, and going home to immediately take off those horrible Sunday clothes (I grew up in the Bible belt) Instead of sitting for 3 hours I sit for about an hour and a half and sometimes I don’t even listen, but I know after church I am going to go visit other members of the church and pour my heart out or talk about my spiritual journey.

I have church ever day of the week with the Fellowship....

Northwest Fellowship is more of a house church than anything else, though at 40-50 people we are bigger than your average house church. Our weekly gathering takes place at the Harambee Center in Pasadena, California on Sunday mornings at 9:30 am. Sometimes I don’t even go to that gathering, but I have church every week with the Fellowship - that's something I like about our church, that we try to be church seven days a week.

Yesterday, I went to a soccer game where I saw the L.A. Galaxy teach the Columbus Crew how to play ball. On the way back home I spent an hour talking to my buddy, John, about what it meant to go to heaven.

Last Sunday I downloaded ringtones on my cell phone...

Confession - I went to church last Sunday and I didn’t listen at all. I downloaded ringtones on my cellphone for most of the time, but I had church in the car last night. In our community we spend a lot of time outside of the church together; eating together, serving the community together, discussing God’s work together.

God has been showing me a lot of things about community that I didn’t want to know. Things come up and I want to ignore them just like I ignore my credit card bills. But like those bills, these things eventually blow up. I’ve found myself being forced to let people in, let them share in my life and that is actually a very hard thing to do even though on some level I want to do it. It means more than having a buddy to hang out with. It has meant a lot of looking at myself and realizing that I can’t do it alone. That is a scary but wonderful place to be (knock on wood).

Sunday meeting is a chance to discover life outside of myself...

I think the actual Sunday meeting of Northwest Fellowship for me is an opportunity to discover life outside of myself as well as inside. Our church has gone through it’s woes, but out of all of the things, it’s greatest success is our desire for community. We may be together with various purposes, but we can love each other. We can open our homes. We can give a ride to someone that needs it. We can feed someone who doesn’t want to cook tonight. We can borrow movies from the neighborhood movie fanatic (uh, that’s me). We are right here together.

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you are the best, I love you my girl.
your dad, Derek Perkins
--derek perkins ( derekprkns at yahoo dot com ) on 4/22/2005; 1:59:56 PM