Forest Hills Mennonite Church

Shared Gentleness

Gentleness (also translated as "meekness") is sometimes misunderstood as weakness. Christian preachers often go to great pains to remind people that meekness isn't weakness. While that may be true, it's also beside the point: gentleness, as a fruit of the Spirit, is about demonstrating softness, tenderness, care, and compassion in all our interactions with others. 

Shared Faithfulness

How do followers of Jesus respond when we feel our most important values are under attack? And what does the fruit of the Spirit have to do with it?

Shared Goodness

What if some of the goodness we lack exists in those with whom we have the deepest disagreements? 

Shared Kindness

Is kindness a form of weakness, the last refuge of people who can't get what they want any other way? Or does kindness contain a surprising and subversive power, a fortitude that allows us to move toward each other even in the most impossible of situations? 

Shared Patience

Is patience a harmful response to injustice?

Shared Peace

One way to think about peace is that it's the experience of nothing being missing and nothing being broken. When relationships seem deeply broken, how might God move us toward peace? Is it possible to escape seemingly endless cycles of retribution, revenge, and violence? 

Shared Joy

Christians know an awful lot about what joy is not—how it's not the same as happiness or it's not circumstantial or it can't be temporary—but what can we say joy actually is? Drawing on emerging insights from neurobiology, perhaps we can say that joy is a communal experience, something that emerges when we're glad to be together. If that's true, then the fact that God is always near to us and always glad to be with us can transform our experience of togetherness, allowing us to rejoice in the Lord always.

Shared Fruit

We're all living through what one cultural commentator calls "a bitter age," one marked by divisiveness, polarization, and distrust. As followers of Jesus, what might change if we drew on an ancient roadmap for flourishing together, cultivating and sharing the fruit of the Spirit by practicing love, joy, peace, patience, and more? This Sunday, we embark on a nine-week journey into God's vision for our life together, using the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5) and stories of unexpected connections forged in the face of difference as our guide.