Welcome to Grace North Atlanta, Alpharetta GA 30004

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Why Grace North Atlanta is About Grace North Atlanta?

Our Worship location is:
175 Roswell St Alpharetta, GA 30004
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Why Church?

A Worshiping, Nurturing, Teaching, Sending Community

We believe Grace North Atlanta is called to be a worshiping, nurturing, teaching and sending community. We value these vital ministries because we believe Jesus ministers to us as well as to the world through the church.

We realize that the idea of the church in our contemporary context has fallen on hard times. While interest in spirituality and even in Jesus is on the rise in our culture, such interest often attempts an ‘end run’ around the church, having come to the conclusion that the church is unnecessary or irrelevant and even possibly a hindrance to one’s personal relationship with Jesus. Plagued by both moral scandal as well as shallow, trivialized spirituality, many churches lack a vibrant, compelling vision of what it means to be a Christian fully alive to the glory of Christ. Because the church is the community that helps the world understand the difference the gospel makes – or what someone has called the ‘plausibility structure for Christianity’ – when the church falls on hard times so does the gospel.

What our present moment calls for is a re-discovery of a theology of the church especially within our American evangelical circles. While we evangelicals have done our job in talking about Jesus, we have not done our job in showing how Jesus can only be found in all his fullness as Prophet, Priest and King in the context of the church.

We have a biblical-theological conviction that Jesus continues His ministry as Prophet, Priest, and King by the work of the Holy Spirit in the corresponding ‘three marks’ of the Church, i.e. preaching, sacraments and pastoral care. In other words, we believe, as diagrammed below, that a Reformed theology of the church has tremendous practical value.

Notice that the church is called to be both a sending community as well as a teaching community or both missional and confessional. Put differently, Grace is both ‘high gospel’ (contra liberal or Roman Catholic churches) and ‘high church’ (contra sensibilities sometimes expressed in low church evangelicalism). By high church we do not mean musical styles or other stylistic preferences in worship. Instead we mean we have a theological conviction that the church is the very ‘point of the spear’ of the Kingdom of God in the world through which God enables persons to experience the gospel more fully as Christ Himself ministers to through the church’s worshiping, nurturing, teaching and sending ministries.

So the answer to question Why Church? is that the church is the place where Christ continues to minister to His people enabling us to experience the gospel more fully. This ‘high view’ of the church translates into a high view of the church as an institution ordained by God to carry the gospel into the future. A high view of the church results in a more profound appreciation for the Word and sacraments, and this shapes our model of spirituality at Grace which may seem a bit different than what is sometimes found in low-church circles. Finally, a high view of the church described above also understands Christ as continuing to rule and care for His people in church leadership and oversight through the church as a worshiping, nurturing, teaching and sending community.