As we enter the year 2025, perhaps you, like many living in our city and world, feel a sense of displacement, of being scattered, confused, blown about by the wind. Literally. If you’re reading this and you live in the town of Augusta, GA, you can certainly relate…especially to the “wind” part.

Our lives, in the last year, have been blown about by a handful of significant hinge events all at once: A testy political/election season. Wars and rumors of world wars. A deadly hurricane that destroyed much of the southeast, including our city, businesses, and homes. All that, in the wake of a global pandemic that altered the way we live our daily lives, might have you and I feeling a good bit scattered and unsettled.

A few years back I read an interesting article in The National Geographic having to do with a new-to-me term: “Hinge event”. A hinge event is something that happens, whether globally or on a local scale, that alters the trajectory of our lives. As we think of the times we live in, we have certainly lived through multiple such circumstances. The world is different, people are different, sometimes it seems like everything and everyone is crazy and nothing is stable.

In the midst of this we are a Christian church built on an immovable foundation of the faithfulness of our God who does not change and will not be moved. We can rest our faith, though it be tried as through fire, on eternal truths that remain even though the earth should pass away! And, it is comforting to know that we are not the only people who have ever lived that have struggled with this sense of displacement and confusion.

Enter the book of James!

Perhaps you know the New Testament book of James as a practical and hard-hitting treatise on faith. That it is, a pointed and powerful voice that speaks to the very most intrinsic issues facing followers of Jesus both past and present. The context of James’ letter helps us understand why this is so.

James was written to Jewish Christians following what is historically known as The Diaspora, or Dispersion, of the first century. Following intense persecution by the Roman government, these believers were literally scattered all throughout the middle east. Cast from their homeland and heritage, they struggled to anchor their faith and live it out in a practical way in very unfamiliar and alien environments. Sound familiar?

Though we at Vineyard Community Church have not been forced through persecution to leave our city, we have in many ways been scattered about. The events mentioned above – political division, world wars, natural disasters, a global plague – are not small things, and still affect us every day. But there is hope that will not disappoint! God is working, even until now.

I feel the Lord inviting us into a new season of faith in the coming year. We’ll spend the first several months of 2025 studying, verse-by-verse, the entire book of James. In this time let’s invite the Spirit of God to refresh us, lead us into truth, and ground us in the good things of God! And be encouraged – as I believe this study is an invitation from the Holy Spirit for us, I challenge each of us to read this short book in advance, perhaps many times over, and prepare for a deep work of God in our lives both as individuals and as a church family pursuing the Kingdom of God among us. May it be!