Cassie Yoshikawa

In 2001, a group of college students and a 29-year-old pastor got together in a living room to talk about what church ought to be. We wrote on 3x5 cards what we thought was important and what we thought wasn’t. Looking back, we were crafting the philosophy of The Well in that room. And the verse that kept hounding us was Acts 2:42. We became convinced that the best way to accomplish the Great Commission was one conversation at a time, and that the Christian life was not meant to be lived alone. Thousands of years of tradition have piled up on top of what the early church found so important. We have made our simple religion complicated and we wanted to go back to some of that early simplicity. The other part of that verse is an unwavering commitment to Biblical teaching. We choose to teach through Scripture chunk by chunk. By walking through Scripture in order, the way God inspired it to be written, we can’t skip topics. Some think that hearing about issues like predestination and homosexuality will drive people away from the faith. Our experience has shown the exact opposite. When those who have dark and painful pasts come and hear a message filled with hope and love and grace, and when they look down the row and see others crying because of the scars of their past and know they are not alone, God moves. We teach the hard topics because they need to be taught, because it keeps us in right relation to our holy God and to each other.