Sundays at Grace

In February, we shared a white paper casting vision for our church’s next season. This spring, hundreds of you took the time to read and respond to that vision. You emphasized the value and felt need for deeper discipleship, community connection, and investing in the next generation. In addition, you overwhelmingly affirmed the following three aspects of the vision from the white paper:

1. Connection in community: cultivating rich Table Communities throughout our neighborhoods and networks
2. Equipping for the next generation: training parents to disciple their children more effectively and be able to worship together as families in multigenerational settings
3. Deepening our faith foundations: recognizing the need to really build on the basics of the Gospel as the culture around us has become increasingly hostile toward our Scriptural convictions

Growing in these areas is no simple task, but after a lot of prayer and planning over the summer, our staff and elders have decided our next steps will include a “Sunday Shift” that will open up a number of new opportunities for all of us to be more deeply equipped, more simply connected, and more flexible to serve and lead natural, organic expressions of Table community through the week.

In short, we are inviting you to be at Grace Snellville for both hours on Sunday morning so that you can (1) worship (Temple) corporately with multiple generations and (2) either grow (Training) or serve (Task) in community. Practically, this means:

• We will start our second gathering 15 minutes earlier so that the new Sunday time slots going forward will be 9:00a-10:00a and 10:30a-1130a, with 30 minutes of transition time between hours.
• We will offer several new classes and spaces on Sunday mornings for adult groups in addition to the groups that already meet.
• We will structure our 9am High School TrueNorth gatherings in order to facilitate more effective training and connection opportunities for our students in smaller group settings. Our LUG AM Middle School gatherings will continue meeting in the MS Room at 9a but also shift to emphasize more training.
• We will adapt our Gracekidz Sunday morning ministries so that children who stay both hours will continue to have a fun, engaging, and Bible-rooted experience.

We are focused on making a “both-hours” Sunday commitment work well for you and your children.

As mentioned above, if your children are in Gracekidz (nursery-5th grade), we will “beef up” their groups so that they have more time for play and a snack without diminishing their opportunity to hear the Word and worship. We imagine many of you with younger children would worship at 9:00am and then participate in a group or serve at 10:30.

If you have middle or high schoolers, our student staff and volunteers will focus on equipping them in some medium-size groups/classes at 9am in the LUG room (MS) and High School room (HS), respectively. In addition, we hope you will be able to participate in an adult class or group on Sunday morning before regathering with your students for multigenerational worship at 10:30.

If you don’t have children, Sundays are a bit more flexible! We invite you to worship one hour and either find a group or serve during the other.

Finally, we are inviting you to be at Grace for both hours on Sunday, but we know some of you will only be able to attend once for various reasons, and of course that remains a completely viable option

Connection: Over the last year, we’ve welcomed hundreds of visitors to our worship gatherings. Not all of those folks have found a home at Grace, but many are now regularly attending worship, and we regularly hear them ask how they can get more connected to our vision and mission. We believe this fall is a prime time to make steps in that direction.

Deepening Faith: Moreover, we have become increasingly aware of significant research that strongly indicates students who participate in the main adult worship gatherings are much more likely to continue in church after they graduate from high school. We still believe age-specific ministry is crucial, and we have historically been very proactive about making space for adults to step into student ministry spaces as D-group leaders, LUG adults, etc. But until now, we have not made it particularly possible for students to step regularly into adult spaces as well.

More Connection: The disruption of COVID has created a great deal of relocation and isolation for people at every age level. In the aftermath, we must be as proactive as ever to create space for relational connection between our people in smaller groups.

Deeper Formation: In our current cultural environment, following Jesus well is as challenging as ever. We need to equip one another in both the essentials of our faith and the specific challenges of living it out.

Opportunity to Contribute: For many of us, changing patterns of church attendance and engagement have threatened to pull us toward being consumers more than contributors in our congregational life. Our Sunday shifts will hopefully open up more opportunities for service and leadership both on the weekend and organically through the week.

• Table communities can range from more evangelistic to less evangelistic
• Table communities can range from more structured to less structured
• Discovery Bible Study is a foundational practice for Table Communities

• As staff, we can’t really schedule or hire for Table
• We can’t “socially engineer” Table with some system or algorithm
• We can equip people to follow Jesus well, make space for them to connect and serve together, and then trust that the Holy Spirit will do the rest

• Have a Rooted Identity in the Lord (Matt. 5:1-20)
• Cultivate healthy, Real Relationships w/ God and Neighbor (Matt. 5:21-7:12)
• Invest their time, talent, and resources to leave a Renegade Legacy (Matt. 7:13-29) (These three bullets are part of our “Mission Measures” for a disciple, and they come from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount)