Unanswered Questions + The Gift of Abiding | Shawnee Community Christian Church

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An Honest Conversation Over Breakfast

A few months ago, I was grabbing breakfast with our retired “big biscuit” group on Shawnee Mission. As we caught up, I mentioned how excited I was to turn 50 soon—thinking that reaching a real grown-up age meant I’d finally have everything figured out. They laughed right out loud, and honestly, they had every right to. We all carry this hidden expectation that at some point, the heavy seasons will magically pass and life will finally make complete sense. But real-life challenges don’t disappear with age. We often find ourselves sitting in the “messy middle,” wondering why we don’t know more by now.

A Neighborly Paraphrase of John 14:1-7

“Don’t let your hearts be heavy or anxious,” Jesus told His friends. “Keep trusting God, and keep trusting me. There is plenty of room in my Father’s presence—it’s an expansive home with space for everyone. I am going ahead to make sure a place is ready for you, and I will absolutely come back to gather you close, so we can always be together. You already know the way to where I’m going.”

Thomas, always the practical and literal thinker, spoke up : “Lord, we honestly have no clue where you’re going. How are we supposed to know the directions?”

Jesus looked at him and said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. Real life is found in knowing me and walking with me. By knowing me, you are already resting in the presence of the Father.”

Resting in the Messy Middle

For generations, people have taken verse 6 (“No one comes to the Father except through me”) out of context, using it like a theological grenade or a slamming door to gatekeep who belongs and who doesn’t. But Jesus didn’t offer this insight to Thomas as a declaration of exclusion. He was talking to a tight-knit family of friends on the single hardest night of their lives—right after Judas walked out and right before the arrest.

Jesus wasn’t handing out a checklist to get into heaven; He was offering a beautiful, restorative invitation to abide. To abide means to rest deeply in God’s grace, knowing that wherever we are, God already is.

We acknowledge with deep humility that the institution of the church has often harmed people by trying to draw lines around God’s love. That is why we actively reaffirm our commitment to being an open and affirming church. God is our home, a divine place of permanent belonging for all people. We are committed to throwing that door wide open, ensuring that no neighbor ever has to hide who God beautifully created them to be.

YouTube Chapters

  • 00:00 – The Adulting Myth: Why reaching a milestone age doesn’t mean you instantly have life figured out.
  • 03:15 – A Troubled Night at the Table: The heavy real-life challenges the disciples faced before the arrest.
  • 06:40 – Unpacking the Misused “Gatekeeping” Text: How John 14:6 became a weapon instead of a promise.
  • 10:10 – What it Means to Abide: Finding safety and receiving God’s peace in the thick of it.
  • 13:55 – Reaffirming the Welcome: Our commitment to being an open, affirming, and actively repentant family.

 

Moving Beyond Conflict to Peace | Shawnee Community Christian Church

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If we are being completely honest, human relationships are messy. We disagree, we say things we don’t mean (or things we do mean but shouldn’t say), and we build up walls of resentment, pretending the divide between us is simply too wide to fix. We look at our broken world, our fractured politics, and our personal disagreements and think: reconciliation is impossible. But what if the blueprint for healing our communities isn’t found in a perfect set of rules, but in the very nature of a mysterious, loving God?

The Scripture: 2 Corinthians 13:11-13

Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Be restored, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

Finding Peace in the Messy Middle

This past Sunday, we celebrated Trinity Sunday—a day dedicated to one of the most beautifully complex ideas in our faith: God in three persons. If you’ve ever tried to explain the Trinity using metaphors like water, shamrocks, or an egg, you know how quickly we run out of depth. And as Pastor Tabatha confessed, that is completely okay. God is not a puzzle for us to solve; God is a relationship to inhabit.

When Paul wrote his final sign-off to the church in Corinth, he wasn’t dealing with a perfect, shiny congregation. They were cliquey, they were suing each other, and they were actively leaving people out. They were in the thick of real-life conflict. Yet, Paul’s parting blessing points them directly to the Trinity: grace, love, and communion.

Our peace and our unity come from the exact same source. We don’t have to fully comprehend the mystery of God to open ourselves up to the grace of Jesus, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. When we lean into that divine community, we are invited to extend that same grace to our families, our neighbors, and even our adversaries. God is extending a hand, inviting us out of our isolation and into a beautiful dance of restoration. Will we step onto the floor?

YouTube Chapters

  • 0:00 – Stumbling Through the Things We Don’t Understand
  • 1:15 – The Mystery of the Trinity: Beyond Our Understanding
  • 3:42 – Relationships are a Messy Middle (Lessons from Corinth)
  • 5:50 – Moving Beyond Hurt and Resentment
  • 7:30 – Invited into the Divine Dance of Love

 

When Church Feels Like a Bad App Notification + The Spirit’s Heart Language | Shawnee Community Christian Church

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If you’ve ever downloaded a language learning app, you know exactly how it starts. You’re motivated, you’re locked into your screen every morning, and you feel great about yourself. But then life gets overwhelming. You miss a day, and suddenly a little green cartoon owl is blowing up your phone with passive-aggressive, guilt-trippy notifications. Before long, what started as an exciting journey turns into a resentful obligation.

Too many of us have experienced a faith tradition that feels exactly like that nagging app notification. We carry the heavy seasons and unpolished scars of religious environments that used guilt and institutional power rather than unconditional love. But this Pentecost Sunday, we are reminded that the movement of God’s Spirit isn’t an algorithm designed to shame us into conformity – it’s a divine breath calling us back to who we truly are.

A Neighborly Paraphrase of Acts 2:1–21

When the day of Pentecost arrived, Jesus’ followers were gathered closely in one room. Suddenly, a sound like a rushing, vibrant wind filled the entire house, and what looked like flames of fire rested gently on every person there. Filled with the Holy Spirit, they began speaking in completely different languages. Permanent residents and immigrants from every corner of the known world—Parthians, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Rome, and Egypt—were utterly bewildered. They weren’t just hearing standard information; they heard Galileans speaking beautifully about God’s power in their own deep, native tongues. While some skeptics laughed it off as too much early-morning wine, Peter stood up and declared: This isn’t drunkenness. This is the fulfillment of ancient hope. God’s Spirit is being poured out on everyone—sons, daughters, young dreamers, and old visionaries alike—bringing a beautiful disruption where anyone who seeks love will find safety.

As our guest preacher Stephen beautifully illuminated, the real miracle of Pentecost wasn’t just a supernatural shortcut to bypass studying a language. The crowd living in Jerusalem already spoke the common public languages of Aramaic and Greek to get by. They didn’t need a mechanical translation.

What they needed was to be heard.

Your first language is your “heart language”—the subconscious language of emotion, the language you use to pray, cry, or whisper “I love you”. For immigrants and outsiders living in a foreign empire, speaking their native tongue often carried social stigma and real danger. By speaking to them in their heart languages, the Spirit wasn’t just transferring data; the Spirit was actively affirming their identities, breaking down systemic walls, and declaring that they belonged.

Today, the institutional church has often forced people to speak “Christianese”—a language of rigid dogmas that can sound closer to an abusive partner than a loving Creator. If you’ve been wounded by the ugly side of church power, hear this clearly: your questions, your background, and your authentic self are radically affirmed here.

We don’t get a magical shortcut or a faith “Duolingo” to fix the hurt in our world. We have to do it the hard way—by staying in relationship, listening longer than we speak, tearing down walls, and learning the unique heart languages of our neighbors.

Our Neighborhood Statement: Shawnee Community Christian Church is a “nesting, resting, and growing place” for our community. We are a family of neighbors valued for our diversity and committed to asking hard questions together.

YouTube Chapters

  • 0:00 – Welcome & Celebrating the Birthday of the Church
  • 3:09 – The Green Owl: My Toxic Relationship with Duolingo
  • 5:48 – Looking Beyond the Familiar: The True Disruption of Pentecost
  • 7:33 – Spiritus: How the Divine Breath Empowers Prophets and Disruptors
  • 10:15 – Shavuot, Immigrants, and the Sacred Nuance of the Miracle of Tongues
  • 11:46 – Heart Language vs. Necessity: Finding Healing for Our Core Identity
  • 15:10 – Moving Beyond Institutional Power and Healing from Religious Trauma
  • 16:53 – Learning the Hard Way: How We Become Living Translators of Love
  • 18:42 – Communal Prayer: A Breath of New Life and Creative Hope

 

When Life Goes Sideways, God Stays | Shawnee Community Christian Church

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We’ve all had those moments where life gets complicated, heavy, or completely upside down. We sit in the quiet, or we lay awake at night, crying out into the dark, “Where are you?” It is an honest, weary question that every human faces sooner or later. When the world feels fractured and we are navigating a tough season, it’s easy to look up at the sky and feel like we’ve been left to figure it out all on our own.

But this week, as the global church recognizes Ascension Sunday, we are reminded of a powerful truth: God is not a “peace out, y’all” kind of God. God is the God who stays.

“Before things got incredibly difficult, Jesus sat at the table with his friends, shared a final meal, and looked up to heaven to pray for them. He basically said: ‘Father, I’ve done what you asked, and now I’m coming back to you. But my friends are still out there in the thick of it. Protect them. Keep them close and keep them united, just like you and I are united. And I’m not just asking for the people sitting at this table right now—I’m praying for the ones who will believe down the road because of them. I want them to know they belong to us, that they are completely loved, and that they carry our joy inside them no matter what happens’.”

John’s gospel doesn’t give us a dramatic scene of Jesus floating up into the clouds while the disciples stand around staring blankly at the sky. Instead, it gives us an intimate table conversation. This prayer was spoken right on the edge of the most painful, grief-filled moments of the disciples’ lives. Jesus knew they were about to enter a confusing, liminal space.

He didn’t pray to take them out of the hard realities of the world; he prayed to sustain them through it.

When Jesus repeatedly tells God, “They are yours,” he is establishing an unbreakable boundary of ownership and love. You belong to God. That prayer didn’t stop in the upper room; it has traveled generation by generation, trailing after us through our happiest days and our most challenging nights, echoing all the way to us today in Shawnee, Kansas.

For centuries, we’ve called these final chapters of John the “Farewell Discourse”. But what if we changed our outlook? What if we called it the Beginning of the Conversation? The Ascension isn’t a story about abandonment or God becoming distant. It’s a transition of responsibility. We are a family of neighbors tasked with living out Jesus’s compassion, love, and healing in real-time. We aren’t doing it alone—we are riding on the coattails of a faith handed down to us, covered in prayer, and walking forward with the Holy Spirit. God goes with you to complete the work you’ve been given. Let’s step off the porch and get to work together.

YouTube Chapters

  • 0:00 – The Vulnerable Front Porch: Sitting Beside Jesus
  • 1:15 – The “I am in You and You are in Me” Breakdown
  • 4:32 – Grounded Insight: What to Do When Life Goes Sideways
  • 7:15 – Active Hope: Turning a Farewell into a New Beginning

 

Finding Your Footing in Life’s Transitions + A Theological Exhale | Shawnee Community Christian Church

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We’ve all been there—waiting for the baby to arrive, the test results to come back, or the moving truck to pull up. These “liminal spaces” are weird, unsettling, and often deeply uncomfortable.

The disciples only had 40 days with Jesus after the resurrection before he was gone again. Honestly, they were a bit clueless, just standing there staring up at the sky until some angels had to basically shoo them away and tell them it was time to get to work.

Reflecting on the Messy Middle: We often try to plow through these “in-between” times as fast as possible to get back to the stuff we know. But as Kate Bowler reminds us, being “exposed” in these moments makes us open to something new. We may not be in control of a “gosh darn thing,” but we can trust that God—acting like a midwife—is with us through the labor pains of what comes next.

YouTube Chapters

  • 00:00 Defining Liminal Spaces
  • 01:30 Scripture Reading: Acts 1:1-11
  • 03:45 40 Days: What the Disciples Wanted
  • 06:15 Standing and Staring: Uncharted Territory
  • 08:30 Kate Bowler: Learning to be Unsettled
  • 11:15 Releasing Expectations for Transformation
  • 13:45 Susan Beaumont: The Loss of the “Not Yet”
  • 16:00 The Pretense of Human Control
  • 17:45 Hanging Curtains: A Mother’s Lesson in Control
  • 20:30 God in the Ambiguity and Weirdness
  • 22:15 Closing Prayer & Mother’s Day Celebration

 

Real-Life Challenges + A Theological Exhale on the Road to Emmaus | Shawnee Community Christian Church

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Disappointment is simply unmet expectations, and it can feel incredibly heavy when life moves on a path we didn’t choose.

Think about that “picture-perfect” Thanksgiving dinner you spent weeks preparing for, only to have it fall apart because you couldn’t control what others said or did.

Like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, we often say, “But we had hoped,” treating hope as something that only exists in the past. Yet, even on our driest, most drought-filled roads, Christ shows up—often in ways we don’t immediately recognize.

YouTube Chapters

0:00 – The Weight of Disappointment
4:15 – The Thanksgiving Dinner Disaster
8:30 – Four Words that Break Your Heart
15:45 – God Always Shows Up

 

The Charcoal Fire: Accepting Forgiveness When You Can’t Forgive Yourself | Shawnee Community Christian Church

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Regret is a lonely place to live. It tells us we aren’t worthy of love and that our worst mistakes define us. But faith isn’t about being perfect; it’s a “group project” where we lean on God’s abundance when our own reserves are dry.

“After everything went sideways, Peter and the guys went back to the only thing they knew: fishing. They caught nothing all night. At dawn, a guy on the beach—who they didn’t realize was Jesus—told them to try the other side of the boat. Suddenly, they had more fish than they could carry. When they got to shore, Jesus didn’t give them a lecture; He gave them breakfast. He asked Peter three times, ‘Do you love me?’ – matching the three times Peter had turned his back—and then told him, ‘Okay, then get back to work caring for my people’.

We often think God is waiting to condemn us, but Tabatha reminds us there isn’t a “syllable of judgement” in this story. Jesus uses the ordinary—a meal of bread and fish—to set Peter free from his shame.

YouTube Chapters

0:00 – The Heavy Weight of Regret

3:15 – Tabatha’s Paraphrase: Going Back to What We Know

7:42 – Grounded Insight: Why Jesus Makes Breakfast

12:10 – The Three Questions: Mirroring Our Mistakes

18:30 – Active Hope: Being Born Anew in Forgiveness

 

Facing the Messy Middle of Faith + A Theological Exhale | Shawnee Community Christian Church

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Life is full of things that seem too ridiculous to be true—like orcas being the natural predator of a moose. Sometimes, the hardest thing to believe isn’t a trivia fact, but that peace is actually possible in the middle of our heaviest seasons.

In her retelling of John 20, Pastor Tabatha reframes “Doubting Thomas” as “Honest Thomas”. He wasn’t being difficult; his heart was shattered, and he was simply trying to protect himself from more heartbreak by asking for the same experience his friends already had.

YouTube Chapters

0:00 – The Trivia of Truth: Why we need proof

04:12 – Thomas as “Honest Thomas”

08:45 – Grounded Insight: Doubting is not a sin

12:15 – Closing Prayer: A space for our fears and doubts

 

The Exhaustion of Hiding + The Theological Exhale of Peace | Shawnee Community Christian Church

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We’ve all been there—hiding away, practically holding our breath because we’re afraid one wrong move or sound will lead to disaster. It’s a “hot mess” way to live, but sometimes survival is all we have left.

Imagine the disciples as a group of friends who just saw their world end. They’ve barricaded themselves in a room, terrified that they’re next on the list. But Jesus doesn’t wait for them to be brave enough to open the door; he just walks right through the walls of their fear.

The “pit” of fear isn’t just a lack of faith—it’s a reasonable response to a difficult world. But Jesus meets us in that “messy middle” without judgment, offering a peace that doesn’t just calm the surface but fills us from head to toe.

Join us this week as we practice drawing near to the vulnerable.

YouTube Chapters

0:00 – Gritty Insight: Processing Fear through Horror Movies and A Quiet Place

4:15 – Contextual Texture: Why “Fear of the Jews” was actually fear of those in power

8:30 – Tabitha Paraphrase: Jesus walking through our barricaded doors

12:45 – Closing Prayer: Exhaling fear and inhaling the peace that surpasses understanding

 

Carrying the Scars Together: Why Easter is a Group Project | Shawnee Community Christian Church

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We often feel pressured to “get over” things—to find closure and move on. But for most of us, the

realities of grief or disappointment don’t just go away. This week, we’re talking about the paradox of faith: the reality that we can be scared and joyful at the exact same time.

If you look at the first Easter, it wasn’t a polished ceremony. It was an earthquake, a group of terrified friends, and a lot of unanswered questions. In the “Tabitha Version” of the story, the women ran from the tomb with “fear and great joy.” They didn’t have it all figured out; they just had each other.

Resurrection doesn’t mean the “pit” never happened. Even after he was raised, Jesus still had the scars on his hands. It’s a reminder that our stories of survival and exhaustion are sacred. We don’t offer “Christianese” platitudes here; we offer a hand to hold while we navigate the messy middle together.

Shawnee Community Christian Church is a place where we practice being good neighbors. We are an Open & Affirming family that believes hope is our strongest economy. Whether you’re a long-time resident or just looking for a place to rest, there is always a seat for you at our table.

YouTube Chapters

0:00 – The “More Than One Thing” Hook: Why we don’t need closure to find peace.
1:12 – A Neighborly Story: An ex-cop, two pastors, and the arrest that turned into a friendship.
3:47 – The Story in Our Language: Reading Matthew 28—The earthquake that changed everything.
5:27 – The “Tabitha Version”: Why being a “hot mess” doesn’t disqualify you from Easter.
12:49 – Gritty Insight: Why the resurrected Jesus kept his scars (and why yours matter, too).
17:44 – A Prayer for the Neighborhood