Dear Rosebank Union,

On behalf of the staff and leaders of the church I would like to wish you a wonderful new year! As the Joburg busyness ramps up this week we hope and pray you are feeling refreshed and ready for the year ahead.

All our ministries ramp up as well this coming weekend, and we’re excited to get started. Our Youth & Childrens programs are ready to launch on Friday, our evening service is back on Sunday, and we kick off our first major teaching series for the year at both services.

This first series will be something of a ‘theme’ for the year, and is called ‘Gospel Culture: Where Faith comes to Life’.

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The gospel is the good news about the person of Jesus, that is announced through words, spoken or written.

But the gospel, when truly believed, doesn’t remain just as a concept in our minds. It travels to our hearts and starts to change the way we see our lives.

We start to see ourselves and the people around us in our communities differently, indeed our view of the whole world changes! This inner transformation then leads to an outward change in behaviour, in all three of these dimensions.

This is the inevitable Gospel trajectory: from minds to hearts into all practical areas of life!

What this quite simply means then, is that the gospel is something that should be visible. To be sure, it is first heard, and then believed upon, which are all very internal! But the gospel comes not just as a doctrine but also as a power (Rom 1:16, 1 Cor 1:18, 1 Cor 2:4 & 4:20, 1 Thess 1:5), a power which ultimately transforms us from the inside out.

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This journey is essential to every Christian individually, but as a Church we have a particular burden for this as a community.

Churches can very easily default to working only on their doctrine. To be sure, that’s always where we start: orthodox gospel doctrine! But true gospel doctrine must create a gospel culture.

By ‘culture’ we mean the intangibles of our church community or, everything that is said without actually being said directly! It’s what you truly experience as a person having been part of our community for a while.

Tragically, a church can unsay by its culture what it says by its doctrine, and never even realise it. In other words, our behaviour can contradict our beliefs. This is terribly dangerous for those already in the community, but also for those on the outside looking in.

For example, it’s one thing to say we believe in the doctrine of grace, but if a person only feels condemned in our Church community, then clearly our gospel culture doesn’t match our gospel doctrine.

Only when an orthodox, true and comprehensive Gospel Doctrine combines with a Gospel Culture that is visible and felt in the beauty of human relationships, will we be truly harnessing the power of the gospel.

Gospel Doctrine + Gospel Culture = Gospel Power.

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This is the subject of our first teaching series for the year, and will be a theme for the duration of 2022.

We’re really serious about being a Church where the gospel comes to life!

“Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name”

John 20:30-31

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With you in gospel living,

Richard

We were calling it ‘Super Spring’. Our staff were getting pretty excited back in early August about the prospects of open gatherings again, coupled with a spring-time sense of renewal. So we packed our September & October calendar with some of the most important events we could think of:

• The Prayer & Praise Party
• Our X-Squared Youth Camp
• A Campus Outreach evangelism event

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The Disciple-Makers Conference

Now coming up this weekend is a flagship event for for 2021: The Disciple-Makers Conference.

Finding & implementing a personal disciple-making curriculum for a Church is a bit of a ‘holy grail’ in Church circles. As a team we had been searching for a long time. Eventually we just decided to put our heads together and try come up with something as unique as the wonderful Church of RUC.

That’s what Justin, Zwai & I will be launching this weekend: RUC’s own pathway for personally making disciples.

There’s plenty of space for you. We have all the conference trimmings. Come and check it out. Whether you’ve intentionally been making disciples for years, or never really knew it was something you should be doing, this will be a worthwhile weekend to stir up a renewed sense of purpose in your life. 

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New Teaching Series

This conference will coincide with the start our last major teaching series for the year: The Gospel of God. 

‘The gospel has been described as a pool in which a toddler can wade and yet an elephant can swim. It is both simple enough to tell to a child and profound enough for the greatest minds to explore’. 

Timothy Keller

In this series we’ll wade out to the gospel depths where elephants swim. It could be one of the most important series I’ve yet done, and I’m very excited for it!

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To get the most from this, come gather at Church on Sunday. We have space. We have reduced a lot of the hassle around Covid-19 protocols (yet still being safe!).

Meeting, greeting, smiling (with your eyes), singing, listening, praying, laughing, receiving, giving, sharing, serving, loving: this what happens when we’re together on a Sunday.

We’ve been able, by the grace of God, to remain united as a Church at a difficult time when we couldn’t meet together. Now we can meet again, and by the grace of God those gatherings will more than make up for what we missed!

You may have a good reason for not having returned to church in person, or it may be the inertia of a long period of being disconnected from Church. Perhaps it’s time to #RediscoverChurch. This Sunday will be a good one to try! 

Richard