This is the first in a series of four posts to work through the basics of helping people understand, articulate and live out their faith.

We’re going to start with a basic premise that theology matters. There is a foundation that our belief structure provides. The old saying, “Seeing is believing,” is less and less reliable. And as AI images are produced more frequently in the future, it will become even less so.

But it has always been the reverse that is more often true: Believing is seeing. What this means is that our worldview determines our view of the world. If we believe that God is mean and wrathful, then when bad things happen to us, we assume the mean and wrathful God intended them to happen. But if God is gracious and merciful, then as those same things happen to us, we see God working in and through those events in quite different ways.

Our first job as leaders is to be sure everyone has the foundation in place.

While the list of things this might include can be quite long, I’m going to limit it here to a few. But they are essential to the process of sending forth agents of grace into the world:

I have no illusions that this list is complete. In fact, the list is necessarily short and can (and should) be augmented in a fluid and ongoing way. As we practice our faith together, local realities, shifting priorities in our contexts, and our own personal and denominational backgrounds will add and shift things in the list.

But I would contend that if these seven things aren’t there all the time, and if your folks don’t get these, everything else gets really hard to pull off. I would also say that if the first two aren’t deeply embedded then we cease to be Christian – since our faith is first and foremost about who God is and what God does. All our stuff is in in response to the God we encounter in the coming of Christ.