Eternity Church

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Richmond, VA
Eternity Church

We seek to be an authentic local community that welcomes people from around the world to worship and imitate Jesus Christ.

SUNDAY SERVICE // 10:00 am
Individual Prayer
Children's Worship
Nursery
Healing Prayer
Coffee & Snacks after Service

OTHER ONGOING EVENTS
Youth Group
Women's Bible Study
Men's Bible Study
Men's Breakfast

09/05/2026

“When [Peter] admonishes us to always be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks a reason for the hope we have, he’s not suggesting we compile a list of reasons we’re hopeful Jesus might be the Messiah. He’s exhorting us to be ready to explain why we’re absolutely certain He is the Messiah.” — Larry Osborne

09/03/2026

Hot off the presses! Our third volume in the Mission of God series has arrived from the printer just in time for the start of our Missions Emphasis Month!

Come get your free copy of The Promise of God’s Mission this Sunday!

09/02/2026

Beloved People of God,

Have you ever felt the ground shift beneath your feet?

I’ve shared before about a time when I was home on the island, sitting with my Dad in the living room, when I felt the earth shake beneath my feet. Not only my feet. I felt it in my core. So did the recliner. So did the house! It was as if the entire island was shaken! And it was. Mount Cameroon, a few miles away across the channel of ocean between us, erupted. The ground shifted.

The next day, we went to the church in Ela Nguema, facing Cameroon and we watched the fiery lava flow into the sea, staining the rising steam with reds and oranges. I remember being in awe of what we saw, and also a little unsettled because our island is part of the same volcanic chain.

This must have been how God’s people felt as Joshua led them through the Jordan River, into the land promised to them (Joshua 1.2). Like their parents who were left in the wilderness, these men, women, and children passed through on dry ground into a land given to them at the crossroads of the world. Imagine what it must have been like for Joshua when the Lord told him—in the season when the Jordan’s banks were overflowing—to tell the priests to go stand in the river, carrying the Ark of the Covenant, and watch as the waters stopped flowing and “stood up in a heap” (3.13). The rushing river folded up on itself, the crashing waters stacked up as the priests entered and stood on miraculously dry ground (3.17). One by one the people entered God’s promise. One by one, the ground of their personal experience with God shifted. They were stepping into the Promise of God’s Mission, for themselves and for all nations!

This Sunday we are stepping into those same waters, believing the Lord is leading us as His kingdom of priests into a deeper understanding of who He is and who we are in Him (Exodus 19.6; 1 Peter 2.9). Friend, I don’t want to be left in the wilderness. I want to enter on dry ground Into the Promise, and I want us to go together.

For Christ the King,

Brett

08/31/2026

Hey Eternity Youth and Parents!

The new school year has begun! Gone are the carefree days of summer with late nights and even later mornings; back are the days of reading assignments and classroom discussions.

Looking back at years gone by, I’ve recently made an observation—one that is obvious in hindsight but that I didn’t have the words for at the time. I’ve sat in every seat a classroom has to offer. As a kid trekking around the world, I was homeschooled, public-schooled, private-schooled, and boarding-schooled. As a teacher, I’ve led classrooms of elementary, middle school, and undergraduate students. In all of those spaces, as both a student and a teacher, there was always something that made the difference: questions.

Think about it. When students aren't interested enough to ask questions, it means teachers haven’t engaged them enough to care about the topic. I loved the experience of illumination when I finally got what the teacher was talking about. Likewise, I’ve also loved seeing the “lightbulb moment” in my students’ eyes when the concepts clicks. But these moments don’t happen by accident. They follow the back-and-forth search of questions and answers. When it comes right down to it, it isn’t enough to have information—that’s just knowledge. We need to understand that knowledge so that we can apply it—that’s wisdom.

We’ve all crammed for a test, packing our brains to overflowing with information and equations, only for those mentally unprocessed facts to leak out of our minds the minute the test is over. We don’t really understand the ideas because we didn’t ask questions, searching for why the information is important to us.

As followers of Jesus, it’s wonderful that we have access to who He is, but He wants more for us than just an unapplied knowledge of His love and Lordship. He wants us to know Him in the depths of our created being and that only happens when we ask questions—when we share our doubts and uncertainties. What we discover is Jesus, our good teacher, is not afraid of our questions. He loves our questions because they can turn informational knowledge into applicable wisdom. Our questions, when sincerely asked, draw us closer to God, and that is illuminating! Talk about a lightbulb moment!

See you Wednesday!
Brett

08/29/2026

"This is how we have the mind of Christ—operating with His paradigm and assumptions in the world—and it unlocks our capacity to be steadily transformed into the Christlike love of God by the power of the Spirit."
- Matt Tebbe and Ben Sternke

08/26/2026

Beloved People of God,

When was the last time your life turned upside down? On the rollercoaster of life, it’s only a matter of time before we’re flipped again. Sometimes we can see it coming, but other times… not so much. Sometimes these experiences leave us feeling sick to our stomach, but other times they reorient us in ways we didn’t know we needed.

It’s the old adage: things work until they don’t. In life, we learn habits and rhythms and use them, not because they’re right, but because they work. But when the rollercoaster rolls and those old habits or ways of thinking don’t give us the same contentment that they once did, we’re left frustrated and annoyed. So much of childhood is set with old mindset habits. We grow up longing for the validation of others: pleased parents, approving teachers, and happy friends. We learn not to rock the boat, finding our value in these relationships. But then… middle school. We’ve all been there. It isn’t just that our hormones make us go crazy, but that the tried-and-true habits don’t produce the same contentment. Adolescence is where we start searching for new patterns and practices to feed the validation we needed, and this compounds over time.

We don’t want to be discontent, and rightly so! As people, made in the image of God, we are inherently communal. We want to live out what is eternally revealed in the triunity of the Godhead as the Father, Son, and Spirit are in everlasting contentment as our Lord God. We are naturally born with this spiritual longing to be right with God and those around us, and—try though we might—our old mindset can’t get us there. Settling for lesser versions of this, we give in to peer pressure and social norms which either dangerously feed our ego or painfully undermine it.

Through the spinning spirals of life, Paul discovered the way to contentment in every situation. True contentment doesn’t just happen. It is a learned skill and an attitude purposely put into practice. It’s the reverse of what we’ve learned because it’s fostered from the inside out—the opposite of our childhood experience. We experience contentment as we have the mind of Christ, setting our thoughts in discipleship and then living them out in community.

For Christ the King,

Brett

08/21/2026

“Human hurt is not a very promising first step to the accomplishment of wholeness; human hate is not a very promising first step to the establishment of righteousness. Nevertheless, when prayed, they are steps, first steps into the presence of God where we learn that he has ways of dealing with what we bring him that are both other and better than what we had in mind. But until we are in prayer, we are not teachable. It is better to pray badly than not to pray at all.” — Eugene Peterson

08/19/2026

Beloved People of God,

I find it strange when people think Christians are narrow-minded, but even stranger when too many of us prove them right! Reading the grand story of the Bible, we find God’s people as fish out of water, constantly finding new ways to communicate the truth of God’s character through the languages and cultures around them. Joseph went from being a slave and condemned prisoner to the right hand of a global superpower. Moses was raised within the Judaism of his family, the Egyptian learning of Pharaoh’s house, and the wilderness wisdom of his wife’s Bedouin roots, which all prepared him to lead his people. Across Scripture we see God frequently taking the best and most beautiful aspects of all His image-bearers and using those things to draw all peoples to Himself.

This was just as true of Paul as it was of his Jewish ancestors. Paul grew up within the Pharisaic tradition, but also as a Roman citizen. This widened his worldview long before Jesus met him on the road to Damascus and called him to be a missionary to the nations. Paul was always paying attention to his surroundings, leveraging the best ideas of his environment to communicate the good news of Jesus. We see this brilliantly on display from the heights of Athens to the depths of a Roman dungeon (Acts 17; Ephesians 6). Among the Greeks, he used the plurality of idols to share the "Unknown God," and as the frequent guest of the imperial guard, he adopted their military language to describe his service to Christ.

Writing to the multicultural church in Philippi, Paul saw how they were getting lost in translation, creating confusion and conflict among themselves. Instead of narrowing their field of vision, Paul encouraged them to widen it—not to think less, but more! Frank Thielman notes, “Paul asserts the need for believers to cast their intellectual nets widely—to allow all that is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy, wherever it is found, to shape their thinking.”

As Christians, we should be known for our love for one another and our curiosity and compassion toward all, because we’ve been saturated by His Word and empowered by His Spirit. May this be said of us.

For Christ the King,

Brett

08/17/2026

Hey Eternity Youth and Parents!

Why would we ever read letters that weren’t written to us? We should probably ask this question as we’re reading the letters Paul wrote to young churches all over the Roman Empire. These epistles give us a glimpse into Paul’s thinking as well as the worldview and lives of the men and women receiving them. Aware of their cultures and questions, he actively framed their lived experience (and the situations they were facing) within the stories of the Old Testament (e.g., Galatians 4; 1 Corinthians 10). Repeatedly, when helping these congregations get a handle on what it meant to be Jesus’ disciples in their place and time, he wove what they were facing together with God’s character revealed through the lives of men and women like Eve and Hagar, Adam and Abraham (1 Timothy 2; Romans 4–5).

Reading Paul’s letters, we discover what the whole Bible reveals about God (Father, Son and Spirit) and about us (the people made in His image). His letters to people and churches call us to re-enter the biblical story as it unfolds from Genesis to Revelation (Genesis 1.27; Revelation 22.1–4). It’s this mental framework which has led us through the summer following the imagery of fire symbolizing God’s holy presence. In Genesis and Exodus, we saw God revealing His presence through fire, affirming His covenant and calling His people. In the prophets, we saw God using fire to refine and reform His people. Then, on the Day of Pentecost, we witnessed the Spirit of God open our eyes to the same holy fire which once rested above the Tabernacle, now resting above the heads of His disciples. Jesus pouring His Spirit into their lives equipped them with gifts, empowering them to live His way.

We read these letters because, inspired by the Holy Spirit, they speak through the lives of their authors, like Paul, and the real lives of others like Phoebe and Junia, Titus and Timothy, into our own (Romans 16; Titus). So when Paul encourages Timothy to fan into flame the gifts God placed in his life, we hear the Spirit of God calling us to do the same. In these letters, we are given a mirror through which we can see ourselves more clearly.

See you Wednesday!
Brett

Address

1200 Wilmington Avenue
Richmond, VA
23227

Telephone

+18046436200

Website

http://www.EternityChurch.org/

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