Why Alpharetta?
FROM OUR SENIOR PASTOR, ANDREW HARWELL
When Elizabeth and I moved to metro Atlanta a few years ago, something amazed us about our new neighborhood…
Not everyone looked, cooked, dressed, or spoke like us. We had moved into a community that felt more like a global airport terminal than the suburban Atlanta we imagined, and it brought our family great joy as we began to make ourselves at home in this beautifully diverse community.
At the moment, there are around 34 different nationalities who call our community home, all working together to build a beautiful and complex community that, by God’s grace, all together will flourish.
But within a few weeks of living in our community, we began to see that something was not as beautiful as we thought.
While our community is growing in population and has all we could need for a good life, our community often feels isolating.
There are many contributing factors to the isolation that we experience: the quest for affluence and/or power, global immigration, the kingdom-building of home, three-hour commutes, or the COVID-19 pandemic.
We began to realize that the emotional health of our community was not as it should be.
There is an overwhelming number of counselors and psychiatrists in our community - an attempt to heal something broken in the hearts of the people who live here, whether that’s broken relationships, burn-out, image management, shame, or the loneliness of isolation.
The acquisition of “The Good Life” has become the driving purpose in our city.
The longing for flourishing is universal, yet it feels prioritized here in the materialistic culture.
The name of the newest commercial development in our area, Halcyon, calls one to look back at a time that was idyllically happy and peaceful. Our community is attempting to acquire this “ideal” life from the fleeting happiness of wealth and commerce.
It is around this brokenness that we believe a new expression of Christ’s church is needed to communicate the message of eternal hope.
The Gospel message we bring is that all things can be made new through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
This welcome is for people from every class, every nation, every ethnicity, every color, and every generation.
It is around this beautifully diverse and broken community that God has established in Alpharetta and South Forsyth that we are planting a new church, and we hope that, by God’s grace, we will be equipped to engage in these challenges and complexities.
We pray that such a church would be a diverse community and an environment of grace, embracing the mind, hands, and heart of a missionary while partnering with God in His work of restoring all things.
A Prayer For Cities
“Heavenly Father, in your Word you have given us a vision of
that holy City to which the nations of the world bring their
glory: Behold and visit, we pray, the cities of the earth.
Renew the ties of mutual regard which form our civic life.
Send us honest and able leaders. Enable us to eliminate
poverty, prejudice, and oppression, that peace may prevail
with righteousness, and justice with order, and that men and
women from different cultures and with differing talents may
find with one another the fulfillment of their humanity;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”- The Book of Common Prayer
