Become Good Soil

“The Hebrew way to understand salvation is not to read a theological treatise but to sit around a campfire with family and friends, listening to a story. It is the very nature of storytelling to include us, the hearers, in the story… For salvation is not the spiritual diagnosis of souls, one here, one there. It is the story of a people. A community with a past, with ancestors, with common experience.”
—Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places

In this next episode of the Become Good Soil Foundations Series, we invite you to pause and personally explore how koinonia—the heartbeat of the redemptive community modeled in the New Testament—might provide a clue for how we live counterculturally in a world deeply formed by hyper-individualism.

In the film Defiance, we see a heroic picture of redemptive community. The Bielski brothers gather fleeing refugees in the forests of modern-day Belarus to escape the persecution of World War II. There in the woods, with only the essentials, a redemptive community is formed as they struggle to survive. When they host a wedding, it becomes a beautiful reminder that joy and sorrow coexist. (Links to the Defiance Trailer and Wedding Scene here.)

Throughout the New Testament, we see redemptive fellowship being recovered and nurtured by a remnant of people whose hearts are being captured and apprenticed by the Living God. We catch a glimpse of this in Acts chapter 2. Koinonia is defined as fellowship, association, community, participation, and sharing in one another’s lives.

The first picture we have of koinonia exists within the Trinity itself: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in perfect fellowship. But more than simply observing that fellowship, we are invited into koinonia—first and foremost with God.

And from this place of intimate communion with God, the gospel invites us to love others. Paul helps us explore this idea through the imagery of the body in 1 Corinthians 12:25–26:

“The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don’t, the parts we see and the parts we don’t. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance.”

To be in fellowship with others in our fallen age is inherently risky. It involves cycles of rupture and repair. How do we pursue, engage in, respond to, repair, and flourish within a redemptive community? Where might God be inviting you to reconsider your participation in koinonia?

Join us as we explore this profound idea of koinonia together.

It’s all been prologue. The best is yet to come.

For the Kingdom,
Morgan & Cherie

“We cannot become spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.”
—Pete Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality

Friends, how do we learn from Jesus to live the life of the Kingdom in every corner of our existence and every dimension of our personhood?

How do we learn not only to see reality as Jesus sees it, but also to feel in our bodies, engage in our relationships, regulate our nervous systems, and make meaning of our everyday lives as He would?

How do we join the Spirit—and His community of apprentices—in having our whole person transformed into the likeness of Jesus, expressed uniquely through our distinct personhood, relationships and stage of development?

How do we include in our whole person formation our vision of self, God, and others, our communal connections, our relationship with time and our place within all of creation?

As we continue diving into our Become Good Soil Foundations Series, join us for this podcast episode dedicated to exploring whole person formation into the likeness and way of Jesus.

It's all been prologue. The best is yet to come.

For the Kingdom,
Morgan & Cherie

“For many former Smokejumpers, smokejumping is not closely tied with their (current) way of life, but is more something that was necessary for them to pass through and not around, and, once unmistakably done, does not have to be done again. The “it” is within, and is the need to settle some things with the universe and ourselves before taking on the “business of the world.” This “it” is the something special within that demands we do something special, and “it” could be within a lot of us.” —Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire

Friends, how are we to understand the story of our lives as it unfolds across the years? What meaning do we give to our failures and our faithfulness, our losses and our triumphs, the long disappointments and the surprising gifts we never would have chosen—yet somehow needed? And how do we recognize true growth, not only in our own maturing, but in our apprenticeship to Jesus and the life of His Kingdom?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once suggested that the cost of not following Jesus is, in the end, far greater—even in this life alone—than the cost of walking with Him. For discipleship is not merely a matter of belief, but of learning to live in intimate fellowship with Christ, slowly being formed into the kind of people He Himself would be, if He were to live our lives in our place.

In this next episode of the Become Good Soil Foundations Series, we explore apprenticeship and initiation as two essential lenses for making sense of this question: how our small, particular stories are caught up into something far larger—the redemptive and unfolding story of God.

It’s all been prologue. The best is yet to come.

For the Kingdom,
Morgan & Cherie

“It is a world of magic and mystery of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order against chaos, and where a great struggle often makes it hard to be sure who belongs to which side, because appearances are endlessly deceptive. Yet for all its confusion and wildness it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good who live happily ever after and where in the long run everybody, good and evil alike, become known by their true name. That is the fairytale of the gospel.” —Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: the Gospel as Comedy, Tragedy, and Fairy Tale

Friends,

What happens in you when you hear the word desire?

Is there a kind of quickening—something like curiosity?
Or a hesitation… a guardedness?
Maybe a quiet opening that feels like hope.
Or a heaviness in your chest that carries sadness.
Or even a flash of cynicism.

What have you come to believe about desire…
in your life with the Triune God,
in His Kingdom,
in your apprenticeship to Jesus?

And what if the recovery—the honoring and stewarding of desire in its purest form—is actually central to your restoration as an image-bearer of God?

In this next episode of the Become Good Soil Foundations Series, we explore the recovery of longing and desire. Because at the heart of the Christian story is an arresting claim: that desire, in its essence, is not something to fear—but something given by God, meant to lead us to Him and into His Kingdom.

It was the awakening of desire—those fleeting, radiant moments—that first beckoned C. S. Lewis. He described this awakening as joy. And that joy stirred something in him, calling him to search for more.

And the same is true for us.

Our longing is not a liability. It is part of the way back to joy. Everything we love—every glimpse of beauty, goodness, and delight—is from God, is for God, and ultimately finds its home in Him.
The story of the kingdom is a story of desire being gathered up and restored—a great homecoming.

Let’s press forward together.

It's all been prologue. The best is yet to come.

For the Kingdom,
Morgan & Cherie

“To be sure, the kingdom has been here as long as we humans have been here, and longer. But it has been made available to us through simple confidence in Jesus, the Anointed, only from the time he became a public figure. It is a kingdom that, in the person of Jesus, welcomes us just as we are, just where we are, and makes it possible for us to translate our “ordinary” life into an eternal one.” —Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy

How would you answer this question: What is the gospel that Jesus preached?

When I (Cherie) first encountered this question, I was both arrested and bewildered. I had some sense of what I thought the “gospel” might be, but I could not, for the life of me, articulate what it was that Jesus himself preached. I was new in my adult faith in Jesus and spent most of my devotional time reading the Psalms, the Gospel of John, and Paul’s letters.

This question launched me on a treasure hunt that changed my life—and continues to propel me today. It led me first deep into Matthew’s account of the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus, then into Mark’s and Luke’s, and back again to John. Over the past twenty years, I have returned again and again to these profound and sweeping accounts of the earthly ministry of the Anointed One.

What was the gospel that Jesus preached? And what does an apprenticeship look like when it seeks not only to have faith in Jesus, but to practice living the faith of Jesus?

Let’s remember it together. Join us for this episode of the Become Good Soil podcast. Indeed, the Kingdom of God is at hand.

It’s all been prologue. The best is yet to come.

For the Kingdom,
Cherie and Morgan