Life in the City: Welcome

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Welcome to the life in the city podcast from Antioch Community Church in Northeast Minneapolis where we explore what it looks like to be a loving family, inviting all people into the life, changing way of Jesus Christ.
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We’re glad you’re here.
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Hey everybody, welcome to this new podcast from Antioch Community Church here in northeast Minneapolis. I’m Coley Waataja the director of Women’s ministry.
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And I’m Rachel, uh, I’m Antioch office manager.
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OK, that’s your technical title, but really, what do you do?
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Yeah, so our ministry team leaders call me the manager of people and things that might be the best catch all kind of.
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OK, I I don’t know what’s not people in things in the life of a church.
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That’s true, I mean the Holy Spirit, sure.
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Right?
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Sure, huh?
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Yeah, that kind of plays out in your in your time.
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Though as well you you kind of cover all the people.
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Things well, regardless, we’re both here on staff at Antioch and we are excited to start this new podcast.
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We feel like there’s things that we can talk about here that we just can’t talk about in any other format that we currently have.
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We have other life in the city e-mail, which is where the name of this podcast comes from and you know we do announcements on Sunday mornings.
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And we reach out to you guys in the church and the church center app.
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But the podcast we’re excited to have conversations that we just can’t have in any other format.
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Yeah, I mean I think one thing that I look forward to doing on this podcast is hearing from people who most might not see or hear from on stage ’cause we know as a church.
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Yes, we’re an organization, but we’re also a body and a family of Christ, and so there’s lots of people that make up that body here at Antioch, so I think it’ll be fun to kind of.
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Get to see and hear from more people that our church members may not get to hear from.
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Clearly yeah, well, let’s start with.
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Let’s start with the two of us, Rachel.
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I mean you’re on stage, but not everybody necessarily knows you.
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So how did you find Antioch?
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How did you get to here?
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Yeah, in 2017 my husband Joel and I were moving from Pittsburgh to the Twin Cities area and we like all good people that need to find churches.
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Started on Google and Antioch was one of the first searches that popped up that we seemed to kind of fit some of.
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Of course.
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Of our areas that we were looking for, so we visited Antioch when Antioch was still meeting in the Ukrainian Event Center.
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Oh yeah, and I remember praying that morning of like OK, God like we’re looking for new churches, we want one where we can fit in with like family and a good community.
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So just make it very obvious to us if this would be a good community to fit in and be very.
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Welcoming and we know more than like pulled in the parking lot of the Ukrainian Event Center and we’re getting out of our car.
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We still had Pennsylvania plates and Dan Moose who he’s a member of our church.
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He also works for the FCA District office.
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He saw our Pennsylvania plates and from across the parking lot.
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Like yelled Pennsylvania?
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And like caught dolini and started chatting with us on our way into the building.
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And that’s awesome.
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We got to meet other people and one thing that Joel and I look for in teachings of churches is knowing that Christ is at the center of the teaching and we have this thing that it might be silly, but we call it the J count.
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Like, how much does a church actually talk?
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About the person of Jesus right?
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Almost because if the good news centers on the work and life, death, resurrection of Jesus, we should hear the name Jesus mentioned and Antioch had a very high J count, so.
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He still passed our standards with.
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That’s awesome.
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That, so that’s how we came to Antioch.
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But I mean, you’ve got a different story.
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I don’t know if you chose Antioch, Antioch shows you.
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How did that start?
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Yeah, I mean that’s a great way to say it.
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I feel like I sort of fell into this, but uhm, I got involved back when Antioch was just a core team.
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We didn’t even have the name antiok.
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We didn’t know where we would be meeting.
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All that we just were in a small group of people that were exploring what might God be calling us to do if we were to start a church in northeast Minneapolis?
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So at the time I was single, I was working part time jobs but since 2008 when we planted.
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Uhm, we’ve moved locations and we’ve done all sorts of things, but.
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Did you meet your husband at Antioch too?
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I did meet my husband glow.
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I know.
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Well, yeah, I have. I don’t have anything sassy to say about that, but yeah, so my husband and I live in Northeast and we love it and our stepson and are now 2 1/2 year old son as well. I think they.
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Like it?
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2 1/2 year old doesn’t say much about it, but.
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Yeah, we I’ve loved it since the beginning.
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I mean, we’ve gone through a lot of iterations.
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I feel like you know, we’re we’re teenagers now we’re coming up on 14 years old and.
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Yeah, a lot has happened in those 14.
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You know, it’s funny that you mentioned the Ukrainian center, ’cause when we met there, people used to ask us like what our connection was to the Ukrainian.
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Or if we were a Ukrainian church and we’re like no, we they just rent to us.
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Well, that’s funny.
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You know?
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This is our open space that we can find on a Sunday morning, yeah?
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Yeah yeah, but they were so good to us and now that we’re in the Waterbury building, you know it’s we just have different space and a little more flexibility.
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And all of that but.
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Yeah, that’s that’s kind of my story, so we’re excited to be doing this.
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Yeah, and the podcast is a new thing for Antioch, right?
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We’ve had our Sunday morning services kind of recorded, but a podcast is a new adventure for us.
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Yeah, I mean you hear this on Sunday morning.
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If you call Antioch home.
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You’ve heard this phrase that our vision is to be a loving family, inviting all people into the life changing.
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Way of Jesus.
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And and so we just want to use this podcast to accomplish that as well, and we’re going to do that in.
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A few different ways, definitely.
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I mean on Mondays we get our weekly life in the city emails.
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Which has a lot of our upcoming events and things that people can stay connected with in the life of our church and a lot of our church are in community groups or ministry teams serving there, but we wanted to create a way to really interact with each other and explore ideas that are highlighted in our vision statement and really those core values that make antiok antiok
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Yeah, so through this medium we’re planning on covering a variety of topics and themes we might look at the core values like Rachel mentioned of Antioch and how they play out in the life of our church.
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Kind of in that boots on the ground dynamic.
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We also want to hear stories of how God is at work in the people of Antioch and through the ministries of Antioch.
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We might pull in a pastor to do an ask the pastor segment.
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We might discuss the sermons and but we’re open to your ideas as well.
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We want to hear.
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From you yeah.
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So to that end, if you’re listening to this, we do want to hear from you.
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If there’s topics you’d like to hear us discuss or any funny anecdotes from your community group or things you over heard could say in kids.
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Ministry, or maybe you have a question you’d like to hear on a feature. Ask a pastor segment. We want to hear it so you can follow us on Instagram and message us on there or even we’ve set-up an e-mail address. Podcasts at Antioch Community org. So send us your thoughts.
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We hope to do this weekly.
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We will see.
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But that’s our goal, and they’ll usually be about 30 minutes.
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This one is going to be a little shorter.
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Just ’cause we wanted to hop in and say hi, but.
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Be sure to subscribe to this podcast.
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Make sure you get notified so that you know when new episodes drop.
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And don’t forget to reach out to us.
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We would love to hear from you.
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Until then, we’ll see.
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You later have a great week Antiok.
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This has been the life in the city podcast brought to you by Antioch Community Church in northeast Minneapolis. Join our worship service at 10:00 AM on Sundays in the Waterbury Building or contact US at podcast at antiochcommunity.org. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.