2012 and 2013 Focus

During 2012 Sugar Grove focused upon generosity. The word generosity has been hijacked to mean financial giving but our year long focus helped many people, including myself, to realize that generosity does have to do with your bank account, it has to do with an attitude that immitates God. A person with a generous heart is willing to give their time, their energy, their money, their forgiveness, their patience...

The Spirit has been leading the leadership at Sugar Grove to focus upon connection in 2013. God did not create us to lead a solitary life. He created us to live in relationship with him and he created us to be interdependent with each other. And, lest you forget, he adds us to the church when we accept Christ as our savior through baptism. All of these have to do with connection- connection with God and connection with each other.

However we live in a world that discourages connection. It says 'Don't connect with a church because it is a group of hypocritical people that simply want your money' and  'Don't connect with God because we are not really sure he exists and belief in God is simply a crutch for weak minded people.'  These statements that come at us from every direction should come as no surprise because we know that the evil one still has his hand in this world leading our culture to directly attack God and church.

And then to make it even crazier our church heritage has encouraged a lack of connection to God and with each other. Somewhere along the way we began to believe that our entry into heaven was dependant upon how correct we worshiped God during our Sunday morning worship assembly. Consequently our focus as a church strayed away from God and each other and instead became focused upon the correctness of the worship assembly. We were not able to focus upon God because we became focused upon making sure we did everything correctly. We were not focused upon each other because the bulk of our time together was centered upon performing a correct worship service. This led to people viewing the Sunday worship service as a sacrament that purchased your salvation. The result being that 'church'  was viewed as participation in a worship service- not as connection to God and other believers.

This sacramental view of worship is not Biblical and it harms us being the church that God needs us to be. We don't get to heaven because we worshipped without being entertained, without instruments,  without women doing anything, and because we ate a small amount of cracker and juice. We get to heaven because of the work of Jesus Christ upon the cross to shed his blood for our sins. We are not saved because of what we do or don't do. We are saved because of what Jesus did. We are saved because of our receipt of the grace of God received through faith, expressed through baptism, and sustained through the work of the Holy Spirit dwelling in our heart.

The importance of 'church' lies in the development of relationship with God, each other, and the world around us. 'Church' happens wherever a few of us are gathered. Consequently the idea of focusing upon connection in 2013 is significant because it is at the core of being church.