Tend the Garden Study

Kick off your 10-week experience! Use this time to cast vision for your core group, prepare hearts and minds to grow, plan together, and build excitement around inviting neighbors to join in hands-on Earthcare Activities.

Tonight, you will read a Bible story about the beginning of everything — about the relationships we were made for and how God pursues us when those relationships are fractured. Together, you'll explore a garden where heaven and earth meet and where people, the earth, and God were in harmonious relationship before sin entered the picture.

In tonights discussion, your group will join Jesus and the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemene - a place of deep emotional struggle. In this garden, Jesus stays present to His sorrow. His friends. The earth beneath Him. The Creator God. There, grounded in love, Jesus opens His hands to violence and death. He endured because something greater — New Creation — was ahead.

All hope seemed lost for Jesus's followers as His lifeless body was laid in a borrowed garden tomb. Tonight, your are going to visit this garden, and watch it transform into the Garden of Resurrection. In this garden, there is no hiding, or shame. The exile is reversed and Mary is sent bearing Good News of New Creation for the world.

Tonight, your group will enter the final garden at the very end of the Bible — the garden that’s still to come. It might seem far off and in the distant future, but the Garden of New Creation is one that Jesus invites us to begin tending here and now. Revelation gives us a picture of Jesus coming back to renew and restore a very real, very physical earth. You'll also have a chance to comemmorate the end of your Dinner & Discussion nights with a special reflective activity.