
Community - 'Doing Life Together'
Christian community at Grace North Atlanta is ultimately a calling to ‘do life together’ – learning, loving, living and even dying together in the hope of the gospel. You might have heard it said or even said it yourself that “religion is a private matter.” We believe that Christianity is something that cannot be lived out alone…and that is good news! People in our culture desperately want to be known and to connect with others in a deeper, more authentic relationship – and the people living in the Alpharetta-Roswell-Milton area of north Atlanta are no different. We all hunger for relationship. Christians have the privilege of experiencing a specific form of community made possible by the gospel of grace. One reason people want community is because people want to be known. But fear often inhibits persons from unmasking in front of others and being truly known. The gospel changes all of this. We can experience community in the gospel because there is no more fear in being truly known. The language of “loving one another” is throughout the New Testament and describes very vividly what it means to be a member of a church – we are called to love and care for one another, to share in one another’s joys and sorrows through life-on-life relationships. Our Christian form of community is not based on simply liking each other or sharing a common ethnicity or homogenous demographic. Christian community is based upon our union with Christ, something distinct from the kind of community that can be experienced by the world. Despite feeling the tug to ‘go our own way’ we are reminded that God has always called Christians to do life together, indicated by the title of the little book, Life Together, written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who opposed Hitler and was a leader of the underground Confessing Church in Germany during the time of the Nazi regime. The Christian community is called to do life together in community in no less radical sense in today’s highly individualistic American culture as during any other time in the history of God’s people. Such life-on-life community occurs only in a church where a primacy is placed on people over programs.


Sermons