A Smuggled Bible, a Folding Chair, and the Life You Actually Want

In the 1520s, ordinary people in England pulled the curtains, shut the door, and read the Bible out loud to each other in someone's living room. They had to, because it was illegal. A priest named William Tyndale had translated the New Testament into plain English, and the copies were being smuggled across the Channel in bales of cloth like contraband. People risked a great deal just to hear the words of Jesus in their own language.

I thought about those living rooms a lot this past Sunday, because we were talking about Scripture as part of our Sacred Rhythms series. Then I looked around and realized most of us have a Bible on our phones, three more on the shelf, and no real plan for opening any of them. Tyndale's readers would have found that very strange. So would I, if I were being honest with myself.

That is the heart of Sacred Rhythms. Pastor Clay opened the series with silence and solitude, the practice of getting quiet enough to hear anything at all. (90 Seconds of pure awkward!) This past week was Scripture. More practices are coming, and each one is a habit that Christians have leaned on for centuries because it works. Not a trick or a hurdle, just a way of arranging an ordinary week so that God has room in it. If you feel a little behind on all of this, welcome. Most of us are.

Which brings me to the thing I really want to tell you about. At Next Level, we have a small group experience or SGE for short. It is a 5 weeks around a table with the same few people, and it is built on a simple four-part rhythm. You notice what is going on inside you. You name it out loud. You practice one small thing. Then you carry one word home with you until the next time.

That is genuinely all of it. No homework that needs a calendar reminder, no pop quiz, no one asking you to explain the book of Leviticus. The idea behind it is that real change tends to happen in small, honest steps with other people watching your back, and rarely from one great sermon. Our word for being formed this way is discipleship, which in the Bible's own language means being an apprentice. An apprentice is simply someone who learns by staying close to someone a few steps ahead of them.

Here is the part nobody believes until it happens. Somewhere around the second or third week, someone at the table says something true. It is rarely dramatic. It might be that they are tired, or that a prayer has gone unanswered for years. The room does not flinch. Nobody tries to fix it, and nobody tosses a Bible verse at it like a parking ticket. Somebody passes the tissues, and somebody else says, "Me too." Our anchoring core value is that Your Story is Safe Here, and I have watched that sentence become real in a "living room" with mismatched chairs.

I will also tell you what the SGE is not. It is not a class for people who already have their spiritual lives together. If that were the entry requirement, we would be sitting in an empty room with a lot of unused coffee.

The next SGE opens in the Spring of 2027, when our spring semester begins on February 1. That gives you the rest of this fall to watch Sacred Rhythms unfold on Sundays, try a practice or two on your own, and arrive in February already curious. You will have a head start on the Tyndale readers, who had to do all this by candlelight.

So mark it down, and tell the friend you have been meaning to invite. We will save you a chair, though not the one by the door. That one is taken.