https://vimeo.com/139705448

Wayne, why don't you just start by just telling me a little bit about yourself and what started this whole journey? Now, I've had a passion to know the living God since I can remember. I mean, back to a nine, ten-year-old child in my dad's vineyard having connections, knowing I wasn't alone in the universe, that God was bigger than I was, that hearing stories in Sunday school, I really wanted to believe. So I was raised in a local congregation, grew up in that environment, committed myself to full-time Christian service when I was sixteen, went off to study the Bible, came back, thought I would be more of a traditional pastor going that route. Tried it for five years and there was just things about it that didn't set right with me. I was part of a growing megachurch and it seemed more mechanized than I thought spirituality should be. And I wasn't seeing the fruit in people I had hoped for. So I had a chance to go plant an alternative congregation that was going to be more relational, kind of a community of house churches with a Sunday morning celebration. And that was a mixed bag, some good stuff, some really frightful stuff. The politics, the bureaucracy, always part of pulling us back from whatever we felt like was happening that might be real and deep and abiding, and community having moments of deep community and then it would get impinged upon somehow by something from the outside or some conflict in the congregation. And it seemed like the institution was more driving the life than it was supporting it. I'm not an anti-institution guy. I think there's some organization, some structure is important, but I think the structure's got to support the life, not try to be the life. So at fifteen years of that I ended up on the outside of that and I didn't plan to get here. This is not a course I set out on, but my passion to find out how God really engages people, how I live in that personally, how I help others live in that. It just kind of moved me increasingly away from our human engineered structures that threaten some people who think, well, they're divinely given and inspired. And I look in Scripture and I don't see those things as clearly. I think it's our human attempts to do some wonderful things for God and they're a mixed bag. Some of it is wonderful and some of it's very hurtful. And so I ended up helping people who have just said that the local church, as we've known it for the last really only 500 years, we haven't had that same thing for 2000, it's only been 500. We've had that particularly modality. It doesn't work for us anymore and there's another way God wants to work in the world and I've spent the last 20 years among those kinds of folks. Back up for a minute and let's talk about that 16 year old boy who decided that he wanted to go into the ministry. Did you feel at that time that God spoke to you and said, Wayne, I want you to become a pastor? What happened at that point in your life? You know, what I felt at the time, yeah, it was exactly that. That's the construct of being a young man, giving himself to full time ministry and all the kudos you get from the congregation. Looking back now, I know that I at a very young age had a real affinity for people's approval for getting at the top of the pyramid. Honestly, I even think if I have to do this Sunday morning thing every Sunday for the rest of my life, I'd rather be the one speaking up front than the one having to sit and listen. It might have been, I look back and think I was a mix of that as well. So at the time, I feel like it was genuine, yes, did I have moments where God seemed to affirm that, that I still would say, yeah, there was something about God nudging me in to be an equipper, a teacher among the body of Christ, that was real. That part was real. The modalities we put it in and the motivations that sometimes appealed to, those were much more mixed. So you would say then that it wasn't necessarily that you misread God or that you misunderstood Him. It was that it was more so that maybe it was just a little different pathway than what you chose at that time. Yeah, and I think I definitely misunderstood. I think my most of my life is misunderstanding God. I mean, his ways are higher than our ways. And there's that constant battle, isn't there, between what does God really want here and what does Wayne want that I can find proof texts in Scripture for to kind of justify? And that's an ongoing theme in my life. I'm still sorting out what is really God. Where does God reside here and what is He asking of me versus what does Wayne as a human who wants to be successful and what he does as a job or whatever. And I think our lives are mixed bags. So we're growing to understand who he is and what he wants and how he invites us into life that's just greater than we could possibly comprehend. You said that you were a pastor of a church for five years. What transpired during those five years? Did you feel like things were going well? Did you once you got into it, did you start to feel like, oh, what am I doing here? What transpired during those five years that then made you leave to then go into the house church type setting? Yeah, it wasn't specifically house church, but we can get to that in a minute. I think what it was early on, when I was absolutely delighted to be invited to be on the staff, it was at that point in my life, the best church my family had ever attended and my family had been attending that while I was in college. I'd been there over the summer, they invited me to come on staff and it was everything I hoped a church would be or so I thought. So I was incredibly excited to be there. And the first two or three years of being there, it was a euphoria of I'm 22 years old. I've got all this cachet and mystique of being a pastor. And I didn't use the term. I didn't let people call me Pastor Wayne Machi. It was always Wayne. It was parts of that I didn't like even from young age because just reading Matthew 23 and Jesus saying call no man teacher or rabbi or father, I take those things seriously. And I think pastors not specifically called out there, but it's obviously one of those same words. But as I stayed on to make that institution work, it was more of the pastor CEO model. I wasn't seeing your pastor, but it was everything managed from above. And I started seeing that management step on people's hearts and ask for conformity to what we saw rather than really equipping them to live in God in a way that was meaningful for them. So I began to see people kind of crushed by some of what we were doing. And I had an inner hunger in my heart that was unsettled with, you know, reading Jesus saying, the greatest among you will be the servant of all. And I'm going, we talk about servant leadership, but we're just talking about it. We're we're on top of this thing. And I got uncomfortable enough with those things to say it's time for me to go. I would think it would be strange to somewhat as a young man who really hasn't experienced that much of life yet to to be in that position. I mean, as many pastors are called to be to be a leader when they haven't really experienced that much of life yet. Oh, boy, I had been married all of 10 days. The first day I showed up in the office and I was fresh out of college, 22 years of age. I've been married 10 days in my first counseling appointment because I've not got a schedule. I'm the last guy hired. So whoever comes off the street, some mid 40s woman comes in with some real sexual dysfunction problem between her and her husband. And I've got Reverend Wayne Jacobson slapped on the door. I look back at that now go, oh, the absolute comedy of me pretending to help her and her pretending to be help. And neither one of us knew anything that was going on. So I do think it was absurd. I think it was even more absurd when I'm five years later, I'm 27. I'm leaving it. I'm going to go plant now a different church model. I look back at the absolute arrogance of that now. And I wouldn't. I didn't see it at the time. I thought, boy, God given me direction and I've got this vision and I've got to go do it. I look back now and say that there's a little bit of that was God's impetus. And there's a whole lot of the arrogance of I'm now going to do something that no one else has been able to do for 2000 years. And that's embarrassing. You look back at that. You got that's a little yucky. Again, during that period of time that you were at the church, do you want to expound upon it at all? You leaving the church, the first one I was first church. Yes. Issues would have been authority. It would have been our view of authority. It would have been at one point to have a conversation with a senior pastor. And I asked him, I said, what happens to this? Because it was all built on a top down thing, even even say to the leadership, you're not here to talk to me about what the people think. I tell you what God thinks you tell the people. And that hit me a little weird. There were other conversations that hit me a little strange. And I asked him one day, I said, what happens when you take a denominational job or you retire or take another church somewhere? What happens to this church? Because his theology was the senior pastor is the physical representation of Jesus to the community, which is largely papal, even though this is not a Catholic denomination. But it's very much I represent that. And he said, oh, it'll die just as casually. He said, God's building it on my life. And that's when I really made the decision to say, I don't want to be part of something that's built on a man's life. And then we'll dissolve as soon as he's gone. And honestly, I think that's one of the struggles we have with our mega churches. They they're built on a very strong, engaging personality. And when that personality goes away, they don't sustain for the most part. And if they're embedded in a more of a religious tradition, they might. But when the pastor, the key man is the draw, they don't survive because that's why people are coming. And I didn't want to be part of a kingdom built on a man. And obviously, church structures really, really vary from where I was part of, was almost autocratic. The senior pastor is the head guy, everybody shuts up and goes along. There's others that are absolutely abusive with that. The senior pastor hears from God, no one else does. So shut up and follow me. There's others where, you know, pastors, I know that just live and love and serve people and don't get lost in any of that kind of thing. So we're talking about a pretty broad display of abuse to generous, kind, compassionate thing. I think what scripture is clear about, and I love this about the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the whole ring of power. I think what that says is our human inability to manage others without giving ourselves to abuse or opulence. And it happened for God, you know, they want a king and he's saying, here's what your kings will do. Then he gives them to the best people he's got to be king. And both of them are seduced by the power of that thing. I've seen so many good brothers and sisters, people I love who really have a heart for God, but get in the environment where they've got to tell other people what to do to make this work and that aspect of managing, not just managing a business, but managing people's spirituality. I think it's a drug that we have an inability to resist. And I don't think I'm above it. I don't think I just I've gotten out of environments where I need to manage people spiritually and got into environments where I equip people spiritually because that's not seducing. That doesn't destroy me. That doesn't make me think I'm better than I ought. And I get to tell you what to do and look down on you. I think that's the big thing that disturbs me. Managing people seems to be that ring of power. And even when Frodo tries to use it for good, it's corrupting him. The corruption is coming back here. And I think it's a great parable that Tolkien told. But I think that's I think that's completely in scripture, where he says, you know, the Gentiles lord it over. It's not to be so with you, the greatest among you'll be the servant of all. He's really backing them away. Leadership in his church is not about management. It's about equipping people to live deeply in him. Do you feel, you know, I've heard before that that that a pastor feels called of God and feels like they are the one that can they are the vessel for God's message to people. And that a lot of times then people want to the congregation wants to seek God's word. They are going to that pastor for that word. What word do they get God's word if they are not getting it from that pastor? Well, when I think of God, I don't know how we're going to we have to define who God's word. What does that mean? Yeah. Most people think it's scripture. So our pastors have been most of them academically trained to interpret scripture, have sometimes the original languages. And thus they're they're more knowledgeable about scripture in the average person, the pew. And most people in the pew feel that way. But if the word of God is what I think scripture calls the word of God, which is the son, how to we're all to be living life in the son. Jesus had a relationship with his father and he came not to start a new religion and get everybody to follow along. He wanted to give that relationship away. So as I'm in the father, you are in me. I'm in you. He wanted them, the disciples and Mary and Martha and others to have the same relationship with the father that he did. And he wanted them to pass that along to others. You know, we have this fellowship with him. What we've eyes have seen our ears have heard our hands have handled concerning the word of life. This we announced to you, our fellowship is with the father and we want you to have that same fellowship. So they were looking to give that away. And I think the difference, the idea that the man of God or woman of God has a special anointing or gift in scripture, that means people follow them instead of following Christ. And I think 90% of our religious institutions believe that construct and at least it's not taught people believe that construct. And I think it's a dead model. I saw that's what Jesus intended. He didn't come to start a new religion. He came to fill up in the human spirit what thinks it needs a religion to survive. And so are people that are called, are there people called to be gifted in helping the body of Christ learn to live in him? I think scripture is really clear on that. There's people, God's gifted for that. There's other people now in our day where it's just, it's a chosen vocation. You get to that and yeah, I wanted to play pro sports. I couldn't get in, so I went to Bible school or you know, I could have been a fireman. I decided to be a pastor instead. There's an awful lot of that too, where it's just a vocational choice. And like you say, in our day, it's got my degree at 23, 24, 25, come out and pastoring and doing this work. And I haven't been married, I haven't raised kids. I know nothing about life. When Paul talks to Timothy and Titus about appointing elders, he's talking about overseers and people who have gifts to help facilitate that. They're not men and women who need a job. They're people who've demonstrated their character, demonstrated their life, demonstrated their sound doctrine by the way they live. We don't have time for that anymore. We skip all that and we make it just merely a matter of academic training, academic prowess and the ability to be entertaining in a pulpit. Seems to be the requirements now to be a successful pastor in the way we measure success in our institutions. I think that's a big part of why we're having the trouble that we're having. You used the term a dead model. Was it ever alive? Well, I think the church is a living reality of people who know Christ to walk alongside each other. Have people really doing that, put that in more of a traditional institutionalized structure? Yeah, there are people who have. I learned this there. I got my passion for God there. I'm not down on that to get information to people, help them learn to live this life. I think where we're finding conflict with the day for many people is it's not good at providing community. It's not good at really linking people to each other. It's not good at teaching them how to follow Christ and not be a weirdo and not do strange things in God's name. It's not doing that well. Has it ever? Yeah, I would say I've been part of more traditional structures that I thought were incredibly powerful. My parents have. Their generation is at a different. Remember 50 years ago, our local congregations were not these big mega church machines. They were mom and pop and great grandma and grandpa are there and these people have known each other and they're farmers in the same community. They've known them for years. They know each other, potlucks together. And it was really community. It's been in the last 50 years, maybe more 40 with the whole church growth movement where we definitely moved that local congregation from being a community of persons to being a well-oiled machine that's providing services to a group of consumers. So that's really changed it significantly. But has it had more effective days? I think clearly it has, particularly when times when people couldn't read. So they needed somebody to talk to them. And that was the whole thing where you learn to think through the Bible. You learn to listen to somebody. That's what those guys provided. The opportunity for people to learn and grow and discover. Not the Christ surrogate, not the substitute for Christ. Now follow me instead of Christ. I don't think most pastors 50 years ago had gotten away with that kind of conversation. So I do think they change over time. And I think if we could, we could pick a hundred churches around with maybe within 40 miles of us here and go into them. And every one of those would be different. There'd be aspects of some that would be good, aspects of some that would be abusive and painful, aspects of some that see it's more human effort than God's effort. There's just a broad array of all that because our institutions are so different. That's why it really comes down to individual. What's meaningful to you? What's helping your journey grow? And what's not? Where are you being abused? Or where are you being taken advantage of? Where is your life in Christ not growing? Because you're more into a conformity base jumping through hoops, memorizing doctrines than you are getting to know God and being transformed by Him. So would you say then that things have kind of evolved into this troublesome situation that we're in now with churches? So maybe this God journey wasn't necessary 50 years ago. Where we are in a present time where it is more necessary now? I think it's always been necessary. I think people, I don't know what you mean by the God journey. If you mean people leaving congregations, to me that's not the God journey. The God journey is growing to be loved by Him so that I know how to love others in the world. So it's being loved and loving. It's what Jesus said, I want you to love one another like I have loved you. So let me love you. Out of that you get to love. Now, did that happen more easily in some of these structured environments 50 years ago? Yeah, I think it did. Is it more problematic now that we're mass producing content to a large group of people and not encouraging them to live this? Yeah, it's much more problematic today but it still happens there. I wouldn't say it doesn't. I visit a number of those places in a year's time. I look to encourage people there too and there are people who are learning to live it there. Tell me a little bit, Wayne, about what your definition of church is because I know that a lot of people, if you look in the Webster's dictionary, it talks about a structure of building. What would be your definition of church? I look at it as God's family. I think that's overwhelmingly your language of scripture. The English word church is overwhelming the language of building and corporation and institution. And so most people think the church is the Sunday morning thing. And if you're not in one of those, even though they have very little agreement among them, and they don't recognize each other's membership often times. They're really true Christians to go here even though I were all being generous in our conversation about it. The church, to me, is that family of God. There's one family in the earth of those who are living with God as their father. And hopefully that's an increasing number of people every day. And it's that family that lives and thrives in the world. I gather over there and over there and in my home and various places on a given, yes, you can gather in lots of formats. But it's the family and it's the nature of the relationship. Most people are hungering for today who've known institutional church and know what it is to file in and sit in a pew, file out and not have relationships and be alone. There's a great hunger for community. And I think a healthy family is all about community. It's not about having meetings together, though a healthy family will gather frequently. They'll get together to enjoy each other, but they don't get together and have put chairs in a row and have somebody preach a sermon and somebody do a concert for them. So I think it's that family. And if we don't get a broader definition of church, I think we're gonna find church nonexistent in 20, 30 years because if it's just gonna be those buildings, there's already people who are genuinely part of the church Jesus talks about. But they talk about themselves as being unchurched or de-churched. They see the church as the enemy. The church is that structure over there. Or people in those structures oftentimes see people outside of it as unchurched, de-churched, the same language. And I think we've gotta see if the church is the family, then it's your relationship with God and your connection to Jesus that makes you part of that family. And I've gotta recognize that in all kinds of people I'm with who may have a little bit different theology than I do, who may have a little different way of gathering than I do, but I'm hoping we have a broader view of the life of the church, that it's God's family he's giving birth to on the earth and how we love and encourage one another across all kinds of lines rather than keep trying to get my little group together and organize it uniquely apart from the other brothers and sisters that live near where I live. So I'm hoping we get a broader view of church, but right now it's a battle because there's people that wanna hold it only for these local, only buildings that have it on the marquee are churches. And if you're not there, if you're de-churched or unchurched, and I've been called that by people, part of the de-churched or the duns or whatever that language is, I'm always saying I'm not de-churched. I am more a part of the church than I was when I was a pastor. I have more relationships with people across a broader spectrum, broader conversations about Jesus and who he is, and a narrower understanding of what it is to live in him in my own life. And I consider myself more a part of the church than I've ever been and I love the church. The church is an endearing term to me. It's not the enemy. My goodness, it's the bride of Christ and it causes exhilaration in the heart of Christ and it causes exhilaration in mind to be part of that. Do you feel like, okay, if you feel like church, the structure, the building is not a necessity to be a follower of Christ, to be in church. Do you feel like that's for a mature Christian? Can a young Christian, a budding Christian be involved? Oh yeah, some believers, brand new people can meet Jesus in a more relational environment and learn to walk with Jesus with an older brother, sister, is there a discipleship component to any of us embracing the reality of the church? And the answer is obviously yes, but the discipleship component isn't, I've got to memorize the doctrines, again, I get the rules down and it's not that, it's learning to know him, how he touches me, how he speaks to me, how he makes his will known in my life, how he makes truth known so I can live in the reality of that truth. Can that happen apart from a Sunday morning? I'd say many ways it can happen, it can happen better. It's the difference between a tutorial, if I could have Jordan Spieth give me a golf lesson and there's a thousand other people there in a stadium and he's got a microphone up on a video screen, he's telling me how to play golf, I'll learn some things from that, but my preference would be to walk out on the driving range with Jordan Spieth and say, tell me what I can do to improve my golf swing. I think it's the intimate mentoring that Jesus demonstrated with his disciples. He didn't do training in large groups, he did it in small groups and relationships and connections. Can it happen there? Oh yeah, it happens incredibly well there. So no, but a lot of us, I think on this journey we did get our training wheels in a more established way, in a more conventional way. We got our love for scripture and we got our basic understanding of Christian truth in those kinds of structures and they can be helpful in that too, but they don't seem very helpful to actually sit down with somebody and help them actually do it. I took ground school, I got my POS license at 16, I went to ground school, I learned everything about flying, in a lectured format, with the slide tape presentation on the screen and we're doing all the homework, but the one thing I didn't learn to do was fly a plane. For that I had to get in a plane with an instructor and now take all that I know about weather, navigation, aerodynamics, and now actually learn to fly a plane and there's no substitute for the kind of one-on-one, mentoring, close relationships and I think that's where we really learned to live this life and unfortunately there's a dearth of those kinds of opportunities, you mostly put people, even if you put them in small groups we give them a curriculum and we're still doing that curriculum thing. Instead of you know what, let me show you how you can engage God, listen to him, live in his love and share that love with others. What would you say to the person that would say, well I'm concerned that they're just gonna go off on a tangent and just become, they're gonna go out on some weird thing, some weird journey and how do we know that they're teaching people the right things, how do we know that they're going the right direction with God and that they're not just out there doing some strange, get twist religion into some strange thing. Some people will but our structures haven't been good at protecting us from that either. There are structures that are incredibly abusive and cults that form and people that follow it. What I found is Jesus said that we could trust him. He would send his Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth. So I begin with the idea that Jesus is capable of getting a sincere believer into the way of truth and teaching them how to live that reality. I think that's true. Are there a whole lot of people who think they're following Jesus and they got other agendas that, so they're doing human wisdom stuff and assigning God to it, yeah. But I think most of those honestly, most of the errors in doctrine we've had clear back to the second and third century, some of the heretic movements that the councils had to deal with back in the day, they didn't come from individuals learning to follow Jesus. They came from somebody who wanted to lead a movement of people and bring people under their authority. That's where all the historic heres have come from. It hasn't come from people who are just saying, Jesus, I wanna know you, I wanna follow you. I wanna learn to love my wife, love my kids, love my neighbor, like you love me. Air doesn't come from that. Air comes from people who are trying to create followings and make people dependent on them. So I think we begin sometimes with the fear. And I know I did this when I was a pastor. People would kinda share something they got from outside and I'm not really sure they're right about that or not. It was, well, you gotta be careful and you gotta listen to the elders. And what I'm actually teaching people is you can't trust Jesus to lead you. We're a better safety net than he is. And now I think that's laughable. I don't think he's a better, I don't think I'm a better safety net for anyone. But if you're gonna walk this journey, one of the things you will have is humility, saying, I think Jesus is showing me something. What do you think of this? You're gonna talk to some older brothers and sisters or when you learn a bit of this journey, just be normal brothers. There's people I know and I'm gonna say, you know, I had this thought the other day about, God, it sound right to you. And people will help you go, yeah, it sounds a little out there to me. And they may be right, they may be wrong, but it's the conversation that helps illumine what the Holy Spirit is showing us. So I think that's the greater protection from error than anything else. I don't think leadership is gonna be great protection. I don't think a catechism has been a great protection. It's the Holy Spirit. Jesus didn't convey his truth to a book. He conveyed it to his spirit, who would live in us and help us learn to live that way. A lot of church teachings are that you raise a child, train a child and how does that go? Train a child in the way he should go when their old does not depart from it. Yes, yes. Which I think is a mistranslation of that verse. It really says, train up a child according to the way that he is and he'll not depart from that. And it really is not so much, I'm indoctrinating to a kind of standard or ethic. It's really about raise a child true to who God's made them to be. And a lot of kids who are raised in the standardization of Christian ethics reject it when they get older. A lot of us have raised prodigal children and had to pray them back or worry about them while they're off doing it. It's not the standardizing of behavior. It's teaching people to connect with God, teaching our kids that God's a reality in the other universe, that he wants to know them, that he wants to speak to their heart, that he wants to lead and guide them and how do they do that? I think that happens. I used to think, how can that happen without a Sunday school? I'm more on the page now. How can that ever happen through a Sunday school? Which is mostly, they turn the Bible into morality plays. Do good, get good, do bad, get bad. They kind of school kids in this performance-based stuff. And then when I meet them later in life, they really struggle to know how I walk with God because I don't perform well enough. I still sin and struggle and make mistakes and I'm cool, welcome to the club. Aren't we all? People who pretend they're not are not helpful to the body of Christ because we all struggle and there's none of us. Paul talks about the flesh and spirit warring together and it's an ongoing battle. I haven't reached perfection. So I think we've got to teach people that this is not about performance. This is about engaging a relationship through which he transforms us. Not I need to be good for God, but by being loved by him, he changes me so that I live differently in the world. And I think that's the most important message. It's not whether you go to church or don't go to church. I think the big thing behind that is, are you living an obligation-based life? Are you doing what you're doing for God because you should and because you're trying to get God to bless you? Or is God your father and you know that you're loved and in the loving, find his way of living is not ever an obligation. It's an endearment. He endears me. I want to live the way God wants me to live because God knows what life really is, who Wayne really is and how that life works out. So I think that's the big choice. I think whether you go to Sunday morning event or you don't, isn't the important issue. The question is really, have you learned, are you living only by obligation or are you learning to live in a father's affection that makes obligations seem like a cheap substitute to the reality God wants to put our heart? From a practical standpoint, I look back at my youth and I think of my days in youth group and how I drew strength from knowing that I wasn't alone in the world that I attended a high school that was pretty rough. But I knew when I went back to the church that there were other people there that I gained support from and I felt like, okay, I'm not alone in the world. What would you say to the team who is trying to go on this journey out there that's not in a structured church but is out there living church? How do they accomplish that? Well, if they're living church, as you say, they're going to be having, you don't live church by yourself. You live church in the connections that God gives you in life and I think all of us, if you're in an environment in which they're already pre-planned. So fellowship is, we all sit in the same room on Sunday morning, which I would say, I would question whether that's fellowship. If you've been with a group that's smaller over a period of time, you will have, like you said in your youth group, great friendships, people you really know you, know them, enjoy being together. We all need that kind of connection in our life and if you have a group you go to that can provide that, great. If you don't, this amount of just asking God, God, how is it that you're going to bring those relationships into my life and be looking for people? My daughter went to college with that same kind of passion. How am I going to meet people? She long decided most of the messages she heard in the congregation she visited because she tried that when she got to a strange city as a freshman in college. And the messages were all about guilt and performance and obligation and she just, she doesn't have a heart to sit through that anymore. And she'll say, Dad, how is God going to do this in me? And I said, I don't know, why don't you ask him? Again, let's go back to him. If fellowship is his gift to us rather than something we're responsible to go find, ask him and then respond to who comes your way, what connections you have relationships. And man, I know dozens of stories and hundreds maybe of people who, like Julie was walking across campus one day as a freshman and some gal came up to her who was struggling in her life that her Julie had passed her for a father and asked her and if she was still living the life and this other gal said she wasn't, she was kind of losing sight of that and would Julie help her? And they started this little Bible study and six months later they've got 30 people in a dorm room on Tuesday night, girls sharing the life of Jesus together. So that provided it. Same thing when she was in high school, last year of high school, she just was out of the youth group loop and just as she went to school the next year and interesting enough, the youth group she a part of, she was the only student from her high school as part of that youth group. So she would go to school and be alone. And by not being part of the youth group, she went and she visited some other youth groups that some of her friends went to and decided those didn't work for her and they came and asked her one time, well, what are you doing? Would you ever find a youth group to land? And she said, no, I just didn't really work for me. He said, why didn't you like it? And she would say, well, that's what we don't like about it either because it was a high programmed environment. And so about 20 of them just decided they would be a youth group for themselves that year. And so they'd meet once a week for Bible study. They would hang out together and do worship times and they became their own youth group. And they're still friends 15 years later or 20 years later. So there's lots of ways God provides fellowship. It's not a life of, I'm not going to the structure anymore. So now I've got to live alone. I don't believe in living alone. I think God is a community. He invites us into that community. There are people living around you who are in that community, whether you know them yet or not. And you just want to ask God, how is it that you connect me with them? And if you can't find them anywhere else and you go to a para-church ministry or you go to a Sunday morning event, then go, but go there to make friendships. Don't go there to just be sitting in a pew and putting your time in a service. Go meet people, engage people. Maybe go to some of the small group stuff but see where there's friendships that genuinely form. Not just I'm going to a meeting and I'm still unknown and unseen by the people that are there.