Life in the Church

Glenda Arnold share about serving the needy and evangelizing the lost at With Love From Jesus. 

SGC's first contradance was a great success! Many newbies left at the end of the night saying they had no idea how fun contra was, and all are looking forward to our next contra event in January.

Here is some great common sense from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together.

I spoke with Rick Beech, one of the directors at Habitat for Humanity recently, and he mentioned a new project they have going in Apex for 2013. It sounded like a great opportunity for our church. We would love to partner with them for this project, but we will need someone to act as a facilitator.

Over the last couple of weeks we've been looking at SGC's vision, answering the question, What is SGC to be about? I hope the answer to that question has been made a bit clearer through these blog posts. But there is one last piece of the puzzle to consider.

Let's think about what it means that we serve the needy in our communities, helping God's love to be experienced and not merely heard, encountered and not merely preached. 

Everything the Bible records about Jesus—his birth, actions, teachings, miracles, cross, resurrection, etc.—is written with God's Holy Spirit highlighter that says, "Catch this! It is important!" The words about Jesus are not more inspired than the rest of Scripture, but there is a unique importance to them that has appropriately made them central to the church's reading and teaching for two thousand years.

Proverbs 29:18 says that "where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained, but happy is he who keeps the law." That word "unrestrained" is also used in Exodus 32:25 where at the scene of the golden calf, "Moses saw that the people were out of control." When we lack direction and clarity about vision we may not necessarily build golden calves, but we will fail to move forward together....A church needs vision because people need vision.

If you're going to get a group of people to work together on something you have to be clear about what it is you're trying to do. To get two dozen skilled workers together to build a house, you need clear blueprints and a clear schedule to make sure that the right house gets built. Otherwise you might get a beautiful kitchen in the middle of an empty lot! Building a church is no different. There are a lot of different "blueprints" a church could choose to be about. What are we about at SGC?

In this post we want to look at two dimensions of our vision statement, being bible-saturated and spirit-empowered. The Bible gives us the plans (like The Dangerous Book for Boys) and the Holy Spirit gives us the power (like the trial-and-error of my building project). Without these our efforts at building God's church will be wayward, reckless, and probably just wrong.