Common Thread was born out of a desire to rediscover the historical DNA of church as family, church as movement and church as city. While Common Thread is an organization, it passionately believes that the church is a living, breathing, unprecedented, unstoppable movement, and cannot be contained within a building or a brand. A movement made up of poor and rich, mothers and fathers, thinkers and dreamers, innovators, entrepreneurs and addicts, prophets and poets… all of which are sinners.
Common Thread simply serves the movement. Whether it’s through missional innovation, business incubation, justice work or foundational life together, we do not seek to be another “church”, but rather a thread that unifies all who follow Yeshua and are working for His Kingdom to come to earth.
Listen to Episode 14 of the podcast and access the show notes below.
Future Church Insights:
1. Nick speaks about the purpose of Common Thread
He notes that a group started Common Thread with the desire to “do life together”. The goal was to try to bring Jesus into the spaces they lived and worked in. Common Thread serves missional spaces, people, businesses, and ministries through administrative pieces, networks, resources, connections, or being a sounding board.
2. Nick talks about how people get involved with Common Thread
He points out that there are lots of different avenues to get plugged into the organization that has LLC’s operating under its 501(c)3 umbrella. He talks about businesses recruiting employees through Common Thread; people giving materials; volunteers giving their time to teach technical classes; or others giving monetary donations. Common Thread sees all of these as ways to contribute to build God’s Kingdom together.
3. Nick encourages others to start something in their local community
Nick says that the path hasn’t always been easy, but to anyone who desires to begin something in their communities, “start with the next right thing”. Organizations and ministries can’t start huge, so the best way to approach this type of thing is to take it step by step and build what God is calling you to accomplish.
Goals and Desired Outcomes of Common Thread
- Move our current business into the next phase of growth.
- Build an infrastructure that promotes more sharing together by building a culture of being interconnected.
- Launch a new initiative yearly.
- Move a multiple number of our businesses and initiatives from their current locations into our new hub in the center of Titusville.
Links:
More of a reader? Download the transcription here.
Key Quotes from the episode from Nick Crawford:
“It’s been hard. It’s had really great things to it and it’s been hard. So it’s a joy. There has been so many incredible things that have happened that we’ll cherish forever and be able to take to the Kingdom with us one day, and then there’s just been great disappointment to hurts. I think that’s just life, and so thankful for Jesus.” (7:33)
“And so whether that’s you attend somewhere on a Sunday or do home church, that’s not really important to us as far as something that we’re just attacking. We’re saying if you’re connected with Jesus, you have some capacity, you want to be involved, how do we help you live a life that’s thriving and near to God? If you want to use that in mentoring someone or if it’s your giving or if it’s leveraging your business or if it’s hiring someone, that everyone has a capacity that they can give and they want to give. But we feel like that we have to identify what that capacity is and bless them in it.” (8:30)
“And so trying to get on people’s schedule what works best for them, and just saying, “Thank you so much. This is a huge part of building God’s Kingdom together.” People want to be a part of something bigger than themselves.” (12:03)
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