Come
We love to meet new people and hear your stories! We would love for you to visit and explore with us what it is to follow Jesus. There is no hidden obligation or commitment. Come as you are. Dress however you are comfortable and we look forward to having you hang out with us!
Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary an burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matt. 11:28-30). We want to extend that invitation to you. Come discover a place where your soul can be at rest.
Connect
God designed the Christian faith to carry a strong community dynamic. It is important that we know God personally, but it is also incredibly important to develop meaningful relationships with other people. The Apostle Paul describes the Christian life in terms of a body with Jesus as the head and each of us as small working parts that are next to useless unless we are connected to the other working parts of the body (1 Cor. 12:12-27).
If you are looking for more ways to connect with your faith family, we strongly encourage you to check out our small groups. They are a great way to discover and develop friendships while digging deeper into the practical ways we can connect with God in our daily rhythms.
Follow this link to a list of currently running small groups. Try one that meets your scheduling and geographical needs or that speaks to where you are in life.
Grow
Growth can happen in many, many ways and the Holy Spirit has a way of stretching us all in different ways at different times. If you are feeling like you are ready to grow more in your relationship with Jesus and deepen your level of spiritual maturity, here are some things you can try:
- Remember Matthew 22:37-39. Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important command. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.” Think of some part of your life routine that does not fit well with either of these commands and work on bringing it closer to the goal.
- Be intentional with Sunday worship gatherings. Don’t come to check a box on the ‘good Christian list’. Come with the purpose of looking for ways to learn and grow. Spend our time of music actually singing to God and telling Him how grateful you are for what He has done for you and been to you. Listen to the messages looking for at least one thing that you can take home to work on throughout your week.
- Revisit the Connect step. Are you in a small group? Are you using that time to dig in to Jesus’ teaching and discover His way that leads to life?
- Start memorizing some scripture. Think of a topic that is meaningful to you such as forgiveness, peace, love, strength, or some other area in which you would like to grow. A quick internet search can bring up a list of relevant verses you might choose.
- Set aside a few minutes a day to be with Jesus. It may seem like a small thing, but taking a few minutes every day to reset your focus and plan your day on His terms can make a huge difference over time in how we handle the various triumphs and struggles of life.
- Invest in someone else. This is often harder to think about than it is to do so it is helpful to pair this with the previous point. Be intentional about helping others. Perhaps when you start your day, you can pick a person to serve in some way. Before you know it, you will find a habit developing of looking after others’ interests as well as your own (Phil. 2:4). Besides, we have found that one of the best ways to dig out of our own moments of stress and frustration is to help someone else out of theirs!
- Start into a ministry training course - perhaps something from Vineyard Institute, the Bible Project, or our local Cincinnati School of Supernatural Ministry which runs each fall.
Serve
Perhaps the greatest way to grow in our own lives is to serve others. Jesus said, “Whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant.” This sounds rather upside-down from our normal way of thinking, but Jesus was trying to teach us something about how life really works. If you really want your life to mean something, put it to work making the lives of others better.
There are plenty of ways and contexts in which we can serve. We can serve on personal levels by looking after the best interests of our family, friends, neighbors and co-workers. We can then add the type of serving that plugs into operations bigger than ourselves. We can get involved with ministries that reach out to hurting people we do not know on a scale that we could not achieve on our own.
Several options here at NLV include:
Helping Hands Food Pantry - Open every Monday evening and the 3rd Wednesday afternoon of each month
Family Promise of Butler County - We are on a rotation of churches providing housing one week at a time for homeless families as Family Promise works with them to get started back on their feet with housing and jobs as needed.
Kingdom Kids Children’s Ministry - Help the kids of our community grow up knowing that Jesus loves them and is on their side.
Hospitality Team - If you have a good smile, welcoming people into a space on Sunday morning that feels like home no matter what their week has been like.
Worship Team - Put your musical skills to work helping people connect with and celebrate God’s presence in their lives.
Missions - We take a yearly trip to serve the Lakota-Sioux Cheyenne River reservation in South Dakota and have ongoing projects/relationships developing a church network and school in Haiti.
Go
Jesus’ last charge to His followers after His resurrection and before His ascension to Heaven was for them to take their life-changing faith in Jesus to the world (Matt. 28:19). We can do this in a number of ways such as modeling the way of Christ for others in our daily attitudes and routines, sharing our own story of faith, ministering with the gifts of the Spirit (1 Cor. 12-14), serving others in practical ways or anything else that shows people that God loves them deeply and wants to them to know Him personally.
Don’t keep your faith limited to your car and your church. Take it outside and let the world know what a changed life can look like. Let them know how and why you have a life and peace that goes beyond natural understanding (Phil. 4:6-7)!