Grace Abounding

Join us this Sunday for a special film presentation showing the gospel’s advance in India. In conjunction with a sermon on missions from Psalm 96:1-4, this film will take us to the front lines of gospel ministry in the second largest country in the world.

See the trailer of “Dispatches From the Front: Souls of the Brave” here:

Episode 4: Souls of the Brave from Dispatches From The Front on Vimeo.

We’re pleased to show this documentary, as it is the fourth in a series of videos filmed and produced with the aid of our church’s mother church, Heritage Bible Church.

Good news! Starting in January, we’ve enhanced the teaching & activities we provide to children in GraceKids during Sunday morning services. Every Sunday morning now includes a formative teaching and activity time called “Praise Factory,” aimed at teaching kids truths about God in memorable ways.

Your children will receive teaching geared to their age level through lessons called “Big Questions and Answers for Little People.” They’ll learn truths about God through a Bible lesson, singing, actions, memorization, and crafts. To aid kids in idea retention, the upcoming lessons repeat and build on previous lessons. As you’ve entrusted your children to our care while you worship with the congregation, we do our best to reinforce what you’re teaching them at home by reminding them of the glory of the great God we serve.

On Sundays at 10:30 am, the GraceKids ministry is for children ages 0 to 7, and provides the Praise Factory experience to kids present who are ages 3 to 7. The Praise Factory curriculum was developed by Connie Dever for use at her local church, Capitol Hill Baptist Church. This is the church that kindly let us meet in their facilities at no cost when our church was first getting started. We’re delighted to commend their childrens curriculum by using it in our own church to instruct “the next generation” so they will “put their put their trust in God.” Psalm 78:6-7.

You can find more information on the curriculum here and music the children are learning here.

On Sundays in the month of January, we’re singing an old, forgotten hymn put to new music, called “Hallelujah, Praise Jehovah.” Singer and songwriter Jeremy Casella who was in concert at Grace Church of Alexandria last year has recorded a wonderful rendition of this hymn. Listen by clicking here, then selecting Track 7. Download the sheet music in .pdf format here.

This hymn draws phrases and themes from Psalm 146 to remind believers of our Lord’s certain and generous care for us. It goes along with our new sermon series on the attributes of God, called Knowing God: His Greatness & Goodness. I’m thankful for Indelible Grace for resurrecting old, unsung yet theologically rich hymns like this and rekindling the church’s interest in singing them to God’s praise. Join our church family Sundays at 10:30 am as we meet for worship in Cameron Station in Alexandria’s West End and sing hymns like this to our Lord.

Hallelujah, praise Jehovah,
O my soul, Jehovah praise;
I will sing the glorious praises
Of my God through all my days.
Put no confidence in princes,
Nor for help on man depend;
He shall die, to dust returning,
And his purposes shall end.

Happy is the man that chooses
Israel’s God to be his aid;
He is blest whose hope of blessing
On the Lord his God is stayed.
Heaven and earth the Lord created,
Seas and all that they contain;
He delivers from oppression,
Righteousness He will maintain.

Food He daily gives the hungry,
Sets the mourning prisoner free,
Raises those bowed down with anguish,
Makes the sightless eyes to see,
Well Jehovah loves the righteous,
And the stranger He befriends,
Helps the fatherless and widow,
Judgment on the wicked sends.

Hallelujah, praise Jehovah,
O my soul, Jehovah praise;
I will sing the glorious praises
Of my God through all my days.
Over all God reigns forever,
Through all ages He is King;
Unto Him, thy God, O Zion,
Joyful hallelujahs sing.

©1982 Darwin Jordan Music. Used by permission. All rights reserved. CCLI License #2928610.

We’ll be meeting at an alternate location for worship on Sunday, December 26th. Join us for worship at the home of Jonathan & Christy Matías in Alexandria. For directions, call 703.439.6077 or send an email here.

On Sunday, January 2nd, we’ll be back at our regularly scheduled place of worship, Samuel W. Tucker Elementary School.

Happy Christmas!

In this third and final post on Technology and the Gospel, we’ll overview useful web-based technology that churches, particularly church plants, can utilize for effective ministry. It could be titled “Technology and Church Planting.” The gospel itself is the power of God to salvation, so these tools do not enhance the gospel. Rather, they are effective ways for a church plant to organize, equip, and spread word about God’s gospel work in and through the body of Christ. If you’d like, see Part I here and Part II here.

Church Web Site & Blog
Web site – www.graceofalexandria.org
A carefully-planned, quality-designed, and regularly-updated web site is indispensable for starting a church. You get what you pay for. If you don’t keep the content on your site fresh, you lose credibility with visitors. Not sure where to turn for help? The Worthwhile Company has done a great job creating and suppporting our web presence.

Google Calendar – calendar.graceofalexandria.org
Our church needed a simple, easy-to-use online calendar for our congregation to know what’s coming up at Grace Church of Alexandria. We’ve found Google calendar to be problem-free and easy to integrate into our web site.

Leadership Team’s Blog – www.graceofalexandria.org/blog
We’ve structured this church blog as part of our church’s web site. That way when web visitors find this blog, they’re already on our church’s web site, may navigate to other pages on the site, and then consider visiting our church. We post news of coming events as well as include audio and lyrics to new songs the congregation is learning. In addition, often we share pictures such as these from our Hot Tub Baptism to show friends and donors to our ministry how God is using their prayers and support.

Google Analytics – www.google.com/analytics
A free tool to gauge your web site’s effectiveness in reaching the residents of your community.

Social Media
Twitter – www.twitter.com/gracealexandria
People have discovered and attended our church via Twitter. It’s an easy way to get word out about your church, speak brief encouraging messages to your congregation, and inform attenders about coming events.

Facebook Fan Page – See GCA’s here.
A free page to spread word about your church in your community and to update your congregation on coming events and opportunities to serve.

Collaborative Tools
Google Docs – docs.google.com
This suite of online tools like spreadsheets and word processor allows teams within your church to work together effectively without needing to be in the same place. Best of all, it’s free, unless you want the ad-free version.

Action Method –www.actionmethod.com
If a team within the church needs to co-operate on task management, this is the tool to use. Action Method is a web-based task management tool with the added benefit of an iPhone app.

Email Communication
phplist – www.phplist.com
This tool makes it easy to send out email newsletters and updates to our regular attenders, members, and supporters of our church plant. We have one newsletter for attenders of GCA and one for prayer partners and supporters of our church planting effort in the Washington D.C. metro area. We keep the emails simple and clean, with lots of pictures to draw interest and visually show God’s grace at work in our church family.

Worship Planning Tools
Planning Center Online – www.planningcenteronline.com. Tools like this enable pastors and others who plan worship to do so easily, keeping an archive of past orders of worship and tracking who is available to pray, read, and play instruments in corporate worship.

Sermon Podcasting
Sunday sermons are posted here as a blog post with a player embedded in each post. They’re also accessible via iTunes, an RSS feed, and our church’s main web site. You may think we’re going overboard with so many venues to access our sermon podcast. We’ve found that the average guest to Grace Church of Alexandria has already listened to at least one, if not several, sermons on our podcast. That’s how they know we’re committed to expository preaching that takes the Bible seriously. Numerous members of our church have told me they were eager to visit GCA after listening to our sermons online, because they knew how we handle and preach the Word of God.

I’d like to thank our church’s “deacon of technology,” Shayne McAllister and Peter Beninate, for the contributions they’ve made in managing and enabling the tools our church relies upon. What are other web-based tools you’ve found useful for church ministry and church planting? Share them in the comments area below.

Recently our church observed Orphan Sunday to draw attention to the plight of the 163 million orphans worldwide and to put God’s adopting love on display. Our church is blessed to have several families in the process of adopting, and several members who serve in Christian orphan care organizations. It’s our prayer that the believers of Grace Church of Alexandria will be on the front lines of orphan care for God’s glory. Here are several recommended resources to take the next step in learning about and caring for orphans:

The Orphan Crisis
Christian Alliance For Orphans – www.christianalliancefororphans.org
Together For Adoption – www.togetherforadoption.org

The Alliance represents dozens of orphan care organizations as they work together for orphans. The Alliance is hosting Summit VII on May 12-13, 2011, to equip Christians to be carrying out orphan care. Together For Adoption, started by a former pastor of the church helping us as a church plant, holds an annual conference that celebrates adoption as a picture of the gospel.

Adoption & the Gospel
Adopted For Life by Russell Moore
America World Adoption – www.awaa.org
Bethany Christian Services – www.bethany.org
Abba Fund – www.abbafund.org
Lifesong For Orphans – www.lifesongfororphans.org

Russell Moore’s book Adopted For Life is the best starting point for orphan care and adoption. In a compelling way, Dr. Moore points to every Christian’s adoption into God’s family as the impetus for adopting needy children into your family. America World Adoption and Bethany Christian Services are gospel-centered adoption agencies we highly recommend and trust. I’ve personally gotten to know the folks from Abba Fund and Lifesong For Orphans, two excellent organizations that provide grants and funds for Christian families to adopt.

Foster Care & Emergency Foster Care
Children’s Services of Virginia – www.childrensservicesofva.com
Safe Familes – www.safe-families.org

I’ve recently been learning about the opportunity of permanent and temporary foster care for children from broken or impoverished homes. Though I don’t know much about these two organizations, I think they are a good starting point to exploring foster care.

Orphan Sunday
Orphan Sunday – www.orphansunday.org

If your  family or church would like to participate Orphan Sunday in 2011, this is the place to go. This is the official site explaining the rationale for Orphan Sunday and providing a plethora of resources for taking part in that day.

If you know of other organizations that should be included here, please share in the comments below.

The driving focus of everything we do at Grace Church is to help our congregation know and love God supremely. To do that, we’re convinced that magnifying the glory of Christ is a far better motivator for serving Him, believing in Him, and obeying Him, than merely telling people what God expects of them.

I found the following statement which captures our intent of directing the flock’s hearts to behold Christ. In it, church historian Michael Reeves summarizes the ministry philosophy of the Puritan pastor Richard Sibbes:

“Instead of simply laying moral burdens on young and struggling Christians, Sibbes showed them Christ’s attractiveness so that they might love him from the heart.”

Reeves goes on to say,

“From then, the Christian’s first task is ‘to warm ourselves at this fire of his love and mercy in giving himself for us.’ Only when Christians do that do they truly stop sinning from the heart (whereas when they merely alter their behavior it does nothing for the sin of the heart). In other words, Sibbes believed that the solution to sin is not the attempt to live without sin, but the gospel of God’s free grace.”

Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation, p. 165)

The desire to help our members and attenders find Christ compelling, joy-giving, and worthy of their worship shapes our preaching, prayers, discipleship, fellowship, and leadership. I pray constantly that those who come to Grace Church of Alexandria will find Jesus lifted up in such a way that Christ and his goodness outshine all other competing desires and leads us to live for Him.

Each Sunday in November, our church family is singing “All I Have Is Christ,” a hymn celebrating Christ. When our congregation learns a new song, often we will sing it several weeks in a row to learn it well.

Verse 1 of Jordan Kauflin’s hymn brings into sharp focus 1 John 4:19 (“We love him because he first loved us.”), for it says “If You had not loved me first / I would refuse You still.” Verse 2 revels in Christ’s substitutionary atonement so that we who believe can live. Verse 3 reminds us to live out of gratitude for God’s glory: “Oh Father, use my ransomed life / In any way You choose / And let my song forever be / My only boast is You.” The chorus leaves us with a powerful reminder that the greatest treasure we could possibly have…is Christ. To download a .pdf of the hymn, click here.

I once was lost in darkest night,
Yet thought I knew the way.
The sin that promised joy and life
Had led me to the grave.
I had no hope that You would own
A rebel to Your will.
And if You had not loved me first,
I would refuse You still.

Hallelujah! All I have is Christ.
Hallelujah! Jesus is my life.

But as I ran my hell-bound race,
Indifferent to the cost,
You looked upon my helpless state
And led me to the cross.
And I beheld God’s love displayed,
You suffered in my place.
You bore the wrath reserved for me,
Now all I know is grace.

Hallelujah! All I have is Christ.
Hallelujah! Jesus is my life.

Now, Lord, I would be Yours alone,
And live so all might see
The strength to follow Your command.
Could never come from me.
Oh Father, use my ransomed life
In any way You choose.
And let my song forever be
My only boast is You.

Hallelujah! All I have is Christ.
Hallelujah! Jesus is my life.

Words and music by Jordan Kauflin. © 2008 Sovereign Grace Praise (BMI). Used by permission. CCLI #2928610.

“All I Have Is Christ” is from the Looked Upon album available from Sovereign Grace Ministries.

Last Sunday at Grace Church of Alexandria we celebrated Reformation Day. Annually, we set aside a Sunday to re-tell how the gospel was recovered at the end of the Middle Ages. This year we told the story of Martin Luther on the 493rd anniversary of the day he definitively nailed 95 theses onto the doors of the Castle Church in Wittenburg, Germany.

If you’re interested in learning more about how God was at work during the Reformation, here are the two books I recommended during Sunday’s sermon:

• The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation by Michael Reeves.

This short paperback makes church history and the Reformation come alive like no other book I’ve read. A worthwhile read that retells fascinating stories of believers and rehearses the essential doctrines that were recovered during this theological renaissance.

• Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther by Roland H. Bainton.

Bainton’s classic biography of Martin Luther is a page-turner. With the skill of a master storyteller, he brings to life the millieu and role of the German monk. This book will whet your appetite to read more about the Reformation.

Join us Sunday, October 10th, for a memorable glimpse of how God is rescuing rebels for his glory in West Africa.

At our 10:30 service, the film Dispatches From The Front: Episode 3…I Once Was Blind will be showing after a brief sermon on God’s heart for turning sinners into worshipers. Get a front row seat to seeing the light of the Gospel break out in villages where the darkness of war, poverty, and false religion have dominated. Directions to Grace Church of Alexandria’s meeting place are here. Watch the trailer below:

Episode 3: I Once Was Blind from Dispatches From The Front on Vimeo.