SERMONS | ADVENT GUIDE | ADVENT PROJECTS
Since the early church, God’s people have celebrated the Christmas season every year through celebrating, giving, and singing about the birth of Jesus. This year for Advent, we’re looking at the four “songs” about Jesus’ birth found in Luke 1-2, and how they point to the good news Jesus offers.
To help facilitate LifeGroup discussion, we'll be posting resources for each week of the series.
Week 1: The Song of Mary
Week 2: The Song of Zechariah
Week 3: The Song of Angels
Week 4: The Song of Simeon
To help us prepare our hearts for the Christmas season, we wrote a brand new five-week-long Advent devotional guide for you and your LifeGroup to work through during this season. The suggested donation is $5 per copy.
One of our goals as a church family is to be a generous people. So every year around the holidays, we press into generosity; to think about God’s generosity to us and to talk about how we can grow in walking in the kind of generous love He’s shown to us.
This year we are focusing on three practical ways to grow in generosity:
#1. START TITHING
We consider tithing a spiritual practice that helps develop a lifestyle of sacrificial generosity. We are encouraging members of our church to set up a recurring tithe because the gospel transforms us not just to be generous around the holidays but throughout the entire year. It’s also specifically how we fund and fuel all we do as a church in our city.
#2. Personal Finance Seminar
We want to equip our church family to be spiritually healthy by stewarding the financial resources that God has entrusted us. On January 28 from 9 am-12 pm at our Downtown church, we’re hosting a class that consists of practical training to manage your finances, pay off debt, invest well, and practice biblical generosity.
#3. Give to Serve the City
Serve the City is our initiative as a church family to partner with local organizations serving the most vulnerable people in our city. This year we want to fund the various Serve the City events we do throughout the year to ongoingly serve these organizations and the people they work with. These funds will also go towards our Serve the City Weekend on March 3-5, 2023. We partner with the following local organizations:
Children’s Hospital
Transitions
Home Works for America
The Ezekiel Center
DSS
Epworth Children's Home
Daybreak
#4. Give to AGAPE CHILDREN’S MINISTRY
Last year, we had the privilege of hosting leaders from Agape Children's Ministry in Kenya (watch the interview below if you missed it). Agape is a gospel-centered ministry in Kenya that seeks to rescue street kids, rehabilitate them and if possible reunite them with a member of their biological family. Their model has been incredibly successful in caring for vulnerable children and families, as well as seeing kids come to know Christ through the process.
Agape is a ministry we believe in and want to partner with long-term and there is potential for our church to take a small team there in late 2023. If you'd like to make a year-end gift to Agape, you can do so below.