And the Hello friends and welcome back to part five of our series on What Is Church.

This is part five and the topic that we're going to cover is integration and diversity, integration and diversity and if you're joining me for the first time I would

encourage you to go back and listen to the other episodes in the What Is Church

series in the What Is Church series in short I am summarizing some values that me and my friends have

established as we have barely begun a very simple, stripped down, somewhat raw

as I like it, raw church plant here in Boise, Idaho.

And this value is really close to my heart.

Integration and diversity.

By integration and diversity, the overarching idea is that we don't want to create a church that is segmented that is only targeting like young marriage or old people or young people or white people or black people or rich people or

middle class people or poor people we want the whole thing to be integrated

and diverse because we believe that discipleship happens best when we're hanging out with people that are different

than us.

We believe that when we integrate youth or kids into our gathering that we talk to them and learn from them and get to know them that that

actually is better for discipleship than if we simply did not hang out with people

younger than us. We believe that people that are older than us have so much to contribute

to our gathering. We believe that people who are of a different ethnic background than us have

a lot to teach us about what it means to follow Jesus.

We believe that people who have a different socioeconomic status,

poor people or rich people, have a lot to contribute in their diversity, in their uniqueness, in their

different walks of life and backgrounds. We believe that that is actually very

helpful for all of us to follow Jesus better. So this value is really close

to my heart. In fact, let me give you a little bit of a backstory in particular with how I became

...