Vision 2025, Guide 3: Commitments & Individual Examen
In Portland As It Is In Heaven, 2025
Conclude this series practice (20 min)
In this series, we focused on the practice of Community—leaning further into doing life together as we seek to be a community of love and depth. In the previous Guide, we agreed on our exercises for the week ahead: to read through the Bridgetown Community Commitments and to consider the cost of our desires for Community. Let’s take a moment to conclude this series by discussing each of the four categories of our Commitments and recommitting to each other.
Commit to following Jesus: How are we each feeling invited to recommit to following Jesus this coming year?
Commit to our Community: Where do we each sense an opportunity to invest more deeply in our Community this coming year?
Commit to Bridgetown Church: How could you contribute more intentionally to Bridgetown?
Commit to Portland: How is God inviting us to partner with him to more fully love and serve our city together?
Before we go on, let’s take a moment to recap the decisions and commitments we’re making for this next year. (Leader Note: This is the time to sum everything for clarity. Take some time to close the loose ends. If there’s something that needs more time to discuss/discern, agree on when that follow-up conversation will occur. As you conclude this section, close in prayer, asking God to help us with the commitments we’ve just made.)
Guide overview (2 min)
To speak meaningfully in any way about apprenticeship to Jesus, it’s important to talk about counterformation—about how we are de-formed by the time and place we live, and about what it means to swim against the cultural current of control and toward the formative joy of consent. There are many ways of practicing consent: we consent with our possessions through generosity, we with our relationships through hospitality, and we consent with our image through confession.
One helpful way to practice this formation of consent is praying the Examen. This daily reflection on our day helps us to increasingly yield ourselves to God as we take time to relive that day in his presence. So, in our final Guide for this series, we are going to bridge between this series’ practice of Community and next series’ practice of Prayer by engaging the exercise of praying the Examen.
Exercise for tonight (15 min)
Tonight, our exercise will be to pray the Examen together. The Examen is a form of prayer that involves reflecting back over our day with the Holy Spirit to practice naming signs of his presence to us. While the Examen usually has five steps, we’re going to use one with three: reflecting with gratitude, naming where we saw or missed God, and confessing where we fell short.
As we start, find a comfortable position and get into whatever posture of prayer feels honest and helps you focus. I’ll guide us through the prompts as we review our day with God.
Come, Holy Spirit, and walk us back through our day. What did we do? Who did we talk to? Where did we go? What did we feel? Where were you?
(Leader Note: Let people silently review their day for 1–2 minutes.)
Gratitude: What kindled gratitude? As you reviewed your day, what brought you gratitude? What or who were you thankful for today? Let’s pray aloud, one at a time, short prayers of gratitude, thanking God for every big and small gift we can possibly recount from today.
Review: Where did I see or miss God? As you reviewed your day, where did God show up? Big or small, where did I see or miss God’s presence in a moment or through a person? Let’s pray aloud, one at a time, short prayers noting the little whispers from the Spirit we missed and those we responded to, particularly paying attention to all those we saw and welcomed hospitably as well as those we may have looked past.
Confess: Where did I fall short today? As you reviewed your day, where did you experience a moment of weakness, coming face-to-face with your humanity? Let’s pray aloud, one at a time, short prayers about ways we fell short today, freely receiving God’s forgiveness—a forgiveness that is, mysteriously but certainly, more powerful to shape and redeem us than perfection.
(Leader Note: Close this time asking god for help to see him more clearly tomorrow.)
Exercise for the week ahead (2 min)
Tonight we experienced an exercise that involved collaboration and teamwork, but there are also ways for us to grow in this practice of Community and Prayer on our own throughout the week. We all have busy lives, so none of us have time for too much. But taking a step toward the practice on our own is a way of partnering with God in our own formation for the benefit of the Community. While the practices are personal, they are not private—they are ways of letting God shape us so that when we come together, our Community will be richer, deeper, and more like Jesus.
That said, as this Community Guide completes this series, until the next one, our exercise for the week ahead is to:
Pray the Examen. Whether on your commute home or before you get into bed, take a few minutes each evening to review your day with God, journeying through our three movements: gratitude, noticing God, and confession.
