New & Popular: Find Your People by Jennie Allen

Another wildly popular study on Study Gateway is Jennie Allen's Find Your People, which has struck a nerve in this pandemic of loneliness. This session is on how to find people already in proximity to us.

Show Notes

Promo: Making Time

You have the same 24 hours in your day as the most accomplished people in the world. So why doesn't it feel that way? Follow along on this special 6 episode series as we take a look at how to make more time. By following biblical principles and taking a look at what you really want, Making Time shares the secret to having all the time you need... with a little help from some friends.

Learn more and download group guides at https://lumivoz.com/making-time/

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Another wildly popular study on Study Gateway is Jennie Allen's Find Your People, which has struck a nerve in this pandemic of loneliness. This session is on how to connect with people already in proximity to us. 

 

Watch the video of Session One

Get information on the Study Guide

 

This is one of those studies that I wish I didn’t need. Here’s my confession. I’m a 64-year-old female, married 42 years, mother of five, member of Saddleback Church for 22 years, Christian for 60 years…and I’m lonely. Not a gut-wrenchingly-alone kind of lonely, but just wistful about not having a best friend, with a touch of vague guilt about not trying hard enough with the friends I have. For someone like me, Jennie Allen’s Find Your People is a whole heap of reassurance and hope. I’m not alone in feeling alone! 

In the Find Your People video Bible study, bestselling author Jennie Allen looks at the original community in Genesis, the Trinity, and the creation of people to see what God had planned for us all along. Jennie offers practical solutions for creating true community in a world that's both more connected and more isolating than ever before.

Drawing on fascinating insights from science and history, timeless biblical truth, and vulnerable stories from her own life, Jennie helps us discover exactly how to dive into the deep end and experience the full wonder of community. Along the way, we’ll discover the five life patterns required to build deep, connected relationships.

Jennie Allen is the founder and visionary of IF:Gathering as well as the New York Times bestselling author of Get Out of Your Head, Made for This, Anything, and Nothing to Prove. Her Bible studies include Stuck, Chase, Restless, Nothing to Prove, and Get Out of Your Head. Jennie earned a master’s in biblical studies from Dallas Theological Seminary. She and her husband, Zac, have four children.

Study Gateway is a streaming video Bible study service that gives instant access to video studies taught by hundreds of the world's most influential Christian authors, teachers and pastors, published HarperChristian Resources. Subscriptions plans are available for personal use, for small groups, and for whole churches. Learn more at StudyGateway.com.

Creators & Guests

Guest

Jennie Allen

Jennie Allen is the founder and visionary of IF:Gathering as well as the New York Times bestselling author of Get Out of Your Head, Made for This, Anything, and Nothing to Prove. A freqent speaker at events such as Catalyst and Q Conference, she is a passionate leader, following God’s call on her life to catalyze a generation to live what they believe. Jennie earned a master’s in biblical studies from Dallas Theological Seminary. She and her husband, Zac, have four children.

What is Study Gateway First Listens?

Study Gateway's First Listens: Find your next Bible study! Join host Shelley Leith as she curates first sessions of Bible studies on various themes each season, taught by some of the world’s most influential Christian authors, teachers, and pastors. To learn more, visit https://StudyGateway.com.

First Listens Season 1: Episode 2
Find Your People
By Jennie Allen

Hi there! It’s Shelley Leith here, host of Study Gateway’s First Listens, where you get first listens to first sessions so you can find your next video Bible study.

This season of First Listens is called New & Popular, where we’re listening to the audio of the first sessions of the newest and most popular video Bible studies from HarperChristian Resources that are streaming on Study Gateway. In this season you’ll hear sessions by Louie Giglio, Jennie Allen, Michael Todd, Sadie Robertson Huff, Lysa TerKeurst, Anne Graham Lotz, and Sarah Jakes Roberts, and with these new and popular first listens, you’re going to get some great ideas for choosing your next Bible study!

Today I’ve got another wildly popular study for you, Jennie Allen’s Find Your People. This is one of those studies that I wish I didn’t need. Here’s my confession. I’m a 64-year-old female, married 42 years, mother of five, member of Saddleback Church for 22 years, Christian for 60 years…and I’m lonely. Not a gut-wrenchingly-alone kind of lonely, but just wistful about not having a best friend, with a touch of vague guilt about not trying hard enough with the friends I have. For someone like me, Jennie Allen’s Find Your People is a whole heap of reassurance and hope. I’m not alone in feeling alone! Let’s listen to Session One, where we learn to find people that are already in proximity to us.

JENNIE ALLEN:
- So I wanna tell you the number one question that I hear from you. You ready? How do I make friends? It is this universal thing and yet it's this simple thing, but apparently it feels complicated. How do I find my people? Way back in 2019, before everything changed, I started a podcast to bring people together, ideas together, to teach, to disciple, and what was the very first thing we tackled, the very first thing that was pressing that we saw we had to talk about, friendship, or your lack of it. Everyone feels this, everyone feels this sometimes. I get this question from young people, from old people, people in the middle, single, married, and big families or small families, people that you would think that had a handle on this, people you would never describe as lonely, why? Is this just some human condition? Does it have to be this way? We all feel isolated right now. Independent, I rarely meet people who somewhere somehow don't feel just a little bit lonely. We smile, we nod, we shelter in our places, and honestly, it's killing us slowly, quietly, and we've lost deep, safe connections that God built us for. So, I think this comes at the perfect time. It's time for us to actually look underneath the question of what makes us lonely and why are we lonely and to figure it out and to get free of it.

Without true, deep, connected friendship and community, life feels so empty. We are not built to do life alone. Our world has been deep in this epidemic of loneliness, and it's been like this for a long time. In fact, research tells us three in five people feel lonely, and that that number is just rising. So no longer, unlike most of the generations before us, do we live in a village context, a tight knit community that everything centers around, deep, authentic community isn't set up for us anymore to just naturally walk out the front door and to have people living and doing life right in front of us. And even if somehow it does, people still hurt us, they still let us down. And so we tuck into our little residences with our little family or roommate, or maybe we're alone and we stare at our little screens and we make dinner for just us, and we never wanna trouble our neighbors for anything, so we Amazon it, and we build a small little crevice in the world with everything that we could possibly need. We keep our doors locked and we feel safe, but in building our little world, we are completely cut off from the people outside of it. And we may feel comfortable and safe and independent and even entertained, but honestly, most of us are completely sad.

See, there is a reason. This is all so messy, so difficult, because we are gonna talk about here, there is an enemy who loves for us to feel alone. So we're gonna brave this subject and we're gonna look at it, because God wants freedom for us, He wants thriving for us, and we're gonna unstick from this place where we could stay and we could feel safe and we could hide because God tells us in Genesis, he makes a human and he says, it is not good for man to be alone. And you know that's true in your soul. I wanna say to you, who truly feels alone, that showed up here with just this much hope that maybe things could change, things can change. There is a hope and a vision and an outline for change in this book. God has a plan for us to connect deeply. And he knows that you need this. He knows that we need this. And he knows that we tend to hide and pull away from this. So if you stick with me, if you go through these seven weeks honestly and openly, at the end of this your relationships are going to look different than they did before, you will look different and I believe you will have friends. I know, big promise.

You're also gonna find out though that generations upon generations before us have been fighting the same things that we're fighting. People separated, divided, shame, jealousy, mistrust. Paul fought those things throughout the New Testament. Adam and Eve fought them in the garden and it continued on and on and over and over until us. So let me tell you my hopes for us here. I want us to trade lonely and isolated lives that experience brief bursts of connectedness, for intimately connected lives that know only brief bursts of feeling alone. What would that even look like for you? We're gonna find out, I know, it's a crazy audacious hope, but this is what we were built for, this family, this village, the sisterhood, it's available to us. Even if it feels impossible to you right now, we can build it. God gave us a roadmap to build it and we have to try.

So we're gonna do a crash course that I took personally from this book, and from looking back at generations of how people have lived in this world, why loneliness wasn't such a big deal just a few generations ago, and this crash course I took when we moved from Austin to Dallas, Texas, and we had to start over just about from scratch. And I know it just sounds like it was a few hours away, but man, it may as well have been in the other side of the world because I had to start over, we all had to start over. I showed up with my husband and my four kids and every one of us had to make friends from scratch. And we moved here and we got deeply involved in a community and a family, and here's the thing, I didn't know where to turn for help when I got here, I didn't have anything to do on a Saturday night. How do you build a life out of nothing? And the ache of craving that and knowing that I need it, it's so recent and fresh for me. And honestly, if I hadn't been put in that position where I had to get really intentional and even awkward about making some real friends really fast, I think I might have not had a clue how to do this, but he brought me back to this simple practices, to ways we make friends.

So let's go back to the beginning of this book. How did it start? You ready? Genesis 1, in the beginning God. First, God existed in community with himself. Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and he created us out of his love, a community of three growing and multiplying. Genesis 2:18, says that after God had created one person on the earth, Adam, he said, it is not good for man to be alone. That is the truth that you and I still know, you and I still feel in our bones. So we know that from the beginning of creation in this book, the very first observation God makes about a person is that it is not good for that person to be alone. So God creates a family. He creates Eve and together that first couple have children. And the first community God sets into motion is a family. It is by God's design, a good design. In fact, family was God's first and best place for us to have community, but we know it would break down. Adam and Eve though would be fruitful and they would multiply on the earth and there would be people all over the earth who knew God and love God and who worshiped God, that was the plan. God gave Adam and Eve everything they needed in order to thrive, to grow, to live together on this earth. At creation, Adam and Eve, lived together with God in the garden, they were naked and unashamed, no shame, no shame before each other and no shame before God, free, beautiful, safe, authentic relationship. And they shared the goal of caring for creation. They had a mission.

[MUSIC PLAYS]
I’m so glad you’re joining us here at Study Gateway’s First Listens, and we hope you’re enjoying the first session of Jennie Allen’s Find Your People, published by HarperChristian Resources and streaming on Study Gateway. Study Gateway is a streaming video service, and we’re the only one that has a subscription plan especially for small groups. For our First Listens listeners, we are offering an exclusive rate on our small group plan. When you use the promo code FIRST at studygateway.com, you’ll get a small group plan for up to 20 people for only $15.99/month, a 20% savings. And, for a complete experience with Find Your People, take advantage of our publisher-direct pricing on the essential Bible study guide designed to be used with the videos. You’ll get the group discussion questions and leader materials, the Scripture text and key ideas, and personal Bible study and discipleship activities to do between sessions. Get all the details at Studygateway.com.
And now, back to Jennie Allen.

But what does all of this have to do with you and me and our relationships and our longing for deep connection? Let's keep going, in the creation account, heaven on earth actually happened. Yeah, it was brief because sin entered and it was only between two people and it was beautiful and it absolutely happened. And if we have eyes to see the dynamics that were at work in that moment, in that moment before the fall, before sin came, before everything broke down, before the division and the sadness and the hurt, then maybe we could replicate some of those things in our own lives. And when I slow down and really consider what made heaven come to earth, what did that look like back in the garden of Eden, I see five realities that were there. Five tastes of heaven on earth that show us what real community is made of.

Number one, proximity. They were living together in connection day in, day out, breath in, breath out, God with them. And they were together.

Transparency, number two. The Bible says that they were naked and unashamed. They were safe. They were known and they were loved.

Accountable, they were accountable to each other. They were accountable to God. Scripture says bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, and to God by following his boundaries and not eating of that one tree that he said do not eat of, there would be connection and there would be accountability.

A shared mission, they had a purpose, a beautiful purpose, that they lived out together, they took care of the garden, and they took care of the animals, they named them and they were faithful to be fruitful and to multiply.

And then fifth, there was consistency. They had all the time in the world because death hadn't come into the picture yet, time to watch things grow and mature and be together and time to enjoy.

Proximity, transparency, accountability, mission, and consistency. They made a little bit of heaven on earth. And then I wanna show you that these same things, they work now. In fact, most of the relationships that you've enjoyed in your life, you can look back and see most of those things probably present, most of those tastes of heaven were present in the healthiest relationships that you had. And they provide a framework for how we build a healthy community in our own lives. And during these seven weeks, we're gonna look at the way God established a perfect community so that we can actually reclaim here and now what it looks like to taste a little bit of heaven on earth.

And one by one, those five tastes of heaven, they were broken and proximity turned to separation, separation from each other, separation from God. Transparency turned to shame. Accountability turned to blame and pride and avoidance. And the mission, it was halted, they were kicked out of the garden and thorns and thistles now to find life and time was now not on their side because they had believed the lie. That your eyes will be open and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. See we wanted the power of God without acknowledging the sovereignty in that system. The way I see it is we've been building walls and sewing fig leaves since the garden of Eden. Romans 3 says this, there is no one righteous, not even one, that there is no one who understands, there is no one who seeks God, all have turned away. It's the story of humankind.

And you see the repercussions of that independence everywhere, but nowhere is it clearer and more painful than in our relationships. Nothing hurts more, nothing steals our thoughts, nothing disrupts our happiness more than difficult or broken relationships with the people that we're supposed to be there for, that we're supposed to experience safety and connection with. But we all hurt, we all sin, we all push away, and we're all guilty, and nothing in my relational life has helped me more than coming to terms with these three simple truths, you will disappoint me, I will disappoint you, and God will never disappoint us. And it shifts all the expectations from people to God and he can handle our expectations. God will give you those things that you need, the people can't, and he will show you how he works, mighty works through love and deep relationships between those of us that he sets in community together, you and your people and God together.

So let's fast forward from the beginning in Genesis all the way to the very end, which in the worldview I hold is heaven. Living with God forever and with people who also love him, in the last book of this Bible, Revelation, we learn that in heaven we will be surrounded by every nation, every tribe, we will be together forever, not just singing in some heavenly choir, but living, working, relating, eating, loving, worshiping, enjoying God forever with people that we will recognize, there will be perfect relationships, because there will be no more death, no more division, no more comparison, no more fighting and no more sin. That is our future and Jesus himself references this when he teaches the disciples and by extension us to pray, our father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. He begins in Matthew 6:9, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus gives us these words to pray, a group of diverse people, working, relating, eating, loving, worshiping, enjoying God, not divided, not comparing, not fighting and not sinning, so kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.

Please Jesus, help us prize this vision that you've given us. This is what we're rebuilding. This is what we're reaching for here on earth. Everything that crumbled and broke in the garden, God can raise up again and we can build friendships, relationships and communities, we can thrive together. And my hope is that you would experience a breakthrough, that you would see that there are real practical ways of putting community into the DNA, the fabric of your life. And I hope that this study puts some handles on this nebulous idea of just making friends and finding community, so you can actually go do something about it. And I'm praying this changes everything. I'm praying this changes everything in your life that you view your family differently, that you view your friendships and neighbors, that you view your coworkers differently, that you see that every person around you has the potential to come into your life and to change it in small and big ways. No more living alone.
[MUSIC PLAYS]

Wow! Jennie! She is so great at preaching the Word, and giving us an eternal perspective on an earthly problem, right? You have just enjoyed a first listen to the first session of Find Your People, a video Bible study by Jennie Allen, published by HarperChristian Resources and streaming on Study Gateway. Here at Study Gateway you can find your favorite authors, pastors and Bible teachers, all in one place. We’re the only streaming video subscription service that offers a small group-sized plan, AND has user-based pricing for churches, no matter what the size. And don’t forget, you can use the promo code FIRST to get a 20% savings on a small group plan. What does 20% mean to your wallet? It means you’re going to save $4/month, so instead of $19.99/month, you’ll pay only 15.99/month for your entire small group of up to 20 people, which works out to only 80 cents per person per month!

With Study Gateway, you also get a direct link to our store, where you get publisher-direct pricing on the essential Bible study guide for Find Your People; a study guide designed to help you remember what you’ve learned in the videos, guide your group’s discussion about your insights, dig deeper into what the Bible says about this topic, and apply what you’re learning to your life. Is Find Your People going to be your next study? Get started right now by going to studygateway.com, click start free trial, choose the monthly small group plan, and use the promo code FIRST.

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