Scio Community Church - New Year with New Things

There are lots of fun things happening at Scio Community Church with the coming of the new year. I'm so excited about them I have to tell you about it.

The first thing is the theme for the year. Pastor Kirk calls it the Radical Experiment. (based on the book he used to preach from in the last few months of 2011)  If you click the link it will take you to the page that explains it better.  But here are the essentials:

The Radical Experiment is a year-long commitment to five specific challenges:

• To pray for the entire world
• To read through the entire Word
• To commit our lives to multiplying community
• To sacrifice our money for a specific purpose
• To give our time in another context

To put those initiatives in play there are lots of things we are doing.

To pray for the entire world, we are using the site Operation World.  It breaks the world down into continents and then sets up a prayer list by the day.  Cool eh?

To read through the entire Word, corporately. You can follow along with us if you like. Here is a link to the pdf file of the reading plan that you can download, and here is a link to the YouVersion - online plan. We are using this bible plan as the structure to talk about the bible in a corporate fashion through a blog, called The Scio Journal.  You don't have to be a member of the church to join the conversation.

To commit our lives to multiplying community, we have small groups in the form of prayer groups, bible studies and opportunities to disciple and be discipled.  I'm excited to tell you about the new trilogy bible study starting this January. Each book, Falling in Love with, Living in Love with, and Forever in Love with Jesus is a 10 week study, with daily devotionals, Scripture memorization, and worship songs. Each series has a companion video with teaching from Kathy Triccoli and Dee Brestin, followed by group discussion.  This is a study that you can participate in person or online or both.  Here's the link to the blog with more information.

To sacrifice our money for a specific purpose.  As a church, we have committed to supporting Hope Clinic, The Water Project and our very own Great Commission Air, lead by Scio members Rob and Jennifer Rice.  These are corporate initiatives, and doesn't touch the times and places where God calls us to give on an individual and case by case scenario.

To give our time in another context.  This translates to 2% (one week) of our year.  Go on a missions trip for a week, spend a few hours a week volunteering somewhere God leads you... whatever.  The idea is to GO.  Not forever, but for a time, out of our comfort zone and for the purpose of serving our world. 

Well...  That's a lot.  A whole lot.  But it's good.  I hope you join us when and where you can.  Read the bible with us?  Join a bible study?  We are on a couple of social networks too, search Scio Community on Facebook and Twitter.  There are so many places you can step into the conversations, consider this your invitation!