House Style week 1/5 | Community

You can sit in a room full of people and still go home unknown.

Most of us know both sides of that. The room where you knew everybody and never noticed the person standing at the edge of it. And the room where you were the person at the edge — a new city, a language you are still learning, waiting to find out whether anybody is going to make space for you. Our city is full of people who know exactly what that second room feels like.

House Style is a five-week series on the values this church is built on, and we start with community. Not the word on a website. The actual thing: different nations, different languages, different stories, and whatever it is that holds them together.

Where does a person's worth come from, before they have done anything at all? What does a welcome cost the person giving it? And what has comparison quietly talked you out of?

This house is not made of people who match. It is made of people who belong.

This is message one of House Style.