The 2020 Gospel Test 

Jon Payne, Senior Pastor of Redemption Hill Church in Round Rock, TX recently posted this article which was then shared by Mickey Connolly on the Sovereign Grace Church Development blog.

2020 has provided a host of cultural and personal challenges. Churches face division over preferences and perspectives about the right way to live in a shaking culture. Political parties are simultaneously outraged and divided. The political, medical, and economic future of our country is uncertain, except in the perfect knowledge of our Lord.

Being gospel-centered means that whenever we address another topic, we discuss it in terms of its theological relationship to the gospel. We are determined to view our discussion of death, or race, or love, or politics, or economics, or government from a gospel centric perspective. In other words, we refuse to make these gospel implications the central point of our teaching, such that everything we teach begins to revolve around them.   Everything is not centered around health, or love, or race, or politics, or generosity--all of those topics are centered around Christ. 

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Jon Payne is the senior pastor at Redemption Hill Church in Round Rock, TX. (This article originally appeared on his blog, To See The Glory.)

HisWay Community Church, a recent Sovereign Grace Church partnership and the first in Alabama is led by Matt Turner, a native of Prattsville, AL and a 2019 PC graduate. Matt felt a calling for many years to plant a church in his hometown with an established network of churches, but didn’t know much about Sovereign Grace except that he liked the music.

In the Spring of 2016, the Lord led me back to Sovereign Grace’s website. I was not sure what I was supposed to be looking for until I found SGC’s BCO. This document brought refreshment and excitement because in it I realized I found my family: in doctrine, in governance, and in missional strategy.   It was here that I saw that SGC was not merely a church planting network, but a family of churches that values Christ supremely, is serious about holiness, loves the local church and is passionately pursuing the spread of the gospel among the nations. With tears, I knew I found my family. 

Please pray for HisWay Community Church:

• That God would help them find a facility that can serve the community and faithfully equip the saints for the work of ministry. 

• For gospel transformation and local partnership in a city mired in religion but not yet set free by the power of the gospel.