Bethany Community Church

The Minor Prophets spoke at a time in history when God’s people had become like parched ground. Greed, complacency, lust, pride, and other destructive forces had combined to cut off their individual and collective soul from the springs of living water. God responded by raising up spokespersons to point the way back to life. Set in an agrarian culture, these prophets lived among people who knew the ways of fruitfulness with the land. Their message was articulated in agrarian terms time and again, terms that we too understand best in the springtime of the year.

The prophets invited thirsty people not to become satisfied merely with their own spiritual well-being. Rather, they called the people to become rivers of living water—spilling hope into thirsty lands everywhere.

Our calling is the same. And we’re praying that, collectively, God will speak to us throughout the spring about what it means to be people who spill hope.

This focus will culminate, we pray, in our community contributing resources to drill wells in Africa—providing water, in the name of Living Water. I hope you’ll join us as we journey through the Minor Prophets, allowing God to speak to us so that we might become the rivers we’re called to be.

-Pastor Richard Dahlstrom

Awakening Our Hearts to Faith

As people carrying the name of Jesus become increasingly fractured and antagonistic towards one another, the very unity for which Jesus prayed, the unity which he declared would be the validating testimony of His reality, becomes elusive. We who gather within the walls of Bethany don’t gather in name of John Calvin, or Martin Luther, or even in the name of Peter the Apostle, but in the name of Christ. And though the global church has been fractured, and re-fractured down through the ages, we stand in the life giving and healing waters of Christ’s life to the extent that we believe and live our lives on the basis of the most foundational doctrines which have contributed, not to the church’s division, but its unity. It is those beliefs that are found in the Apostles creed. Dating back to the earliest days of the church, this simple declaration of the faith clearly articulates what the “essentials” are which becomes the basis of our shared fellowship.

This fall, we’re considering each phrase of the creed, but not as a declaration to which we nod our heads in either agreement or disagreement. Instead, we’ll be considering these words in the light of this question: Because we believe this, how shall we live our lives? It is this bent towards responding to God’s voice, found in the ancient declarations of His incredible story of redemption that will awaken our hearts; not just to a new way of believing, but to new ways of living. I hope you’ll be joining us!

Richard Dahlstrom
Senior Pastor, Bethany Community Church