Views from The Ridge 1.08.2025
Sunset Ridge is a church that desires to follow Jesus, reach people, and radiate God’s love and hope to all.
This Week
Second Saturday: January 11th
8am One Another Coffee featuring Plantaqueria Vegan Tacos
9am in Charis Park
Donation-based Yoga with NYX Wellness (Fellowship Hall due to weather)
Sunset Ridge Farmers Market
Nature/Nurture with Artist Karla Kopalli
10:15am Storytime with Miss Anastasia
11am Pedal Pals Demo
Sunday, January 12 Scott Heare preaching: Joel 2:25-27
9am Worship in the Chapel
10:15am Classes for all ages
Adult Classes: Fellowship Hall
Women’s Group: Chapel Classroom
Youth Group: Rm 218
Roots PK-K: Rm 102
Roots 1-2: Roots Room
Roots 3-6: Rm 203
11am Worship in the Chapel
To view recorded sermons from Sunset Ridge Church, please make sure to add us to your subscriptions on YouTube.
Coming Up…
Sunset Ridge Farmers Market - Every Saturday, 9 AM - 1 PM
Jan 16th - Free Headshots for Entrepreneurs 11am-1pm
Jan 20th - Campus closed
Jan 23rd -Dream Week: Neighboring Our Way to Flourishing 6-8pm
Around the Community
Happy New Year, Church!
Entering 2025 has us excited about all the possibilities of growing as a congregation. One thing we are particularly excited to share with you is Church Center. Church Center is a website and mobile app our congregation will use to stay connected. If you have already filled out your contact information, thank you. You will find all this information in this app. Please make sure it is all correct. If you haven’t already done so, please follow this link to download the app that makes it easy to give, sign up for events, check in your children before service, and more.
You will find reminders on our slides at the beginning of service for the rest of the month. As a reminder, all worship (both 9am and 11am) will be held in our beautiful chapel for the foreseeable future.
View for the New Year
Jess Lowry Executive Director Sunset Ridge Church of Christ & Sunset Ridge Collective
Isaiah 43:18-19 (NIV)
“Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.
I’m going to do something a little different to start us off for 2025 and share not my own words, but those that came into my inbox and spoke deeply to my soul and to the renewal we are witnessing as a church community.
I could not possibly express this message better for where we sit as we begin a new year, beloved church. I pray that you would read this and allow it to resonate in your hearts and minds. Here is to a year of renewal, may it begin in each of us.
From January 7, 2025, Daily Meditations:
Rev. Dr. Elaine Heath writes a letter to the church today:
Dear church, God’s one holy, catholic, and apostolic church: …
Let’s get on with our work. You know the parable of the wineskins [see Luke 5:37–38]. For goodness’ sake, you taught that parable to me! We are in a time of wineskin change. Let’s celebrate that instead of wringing our hands. Let’s thank God for the old wineskin and the grace it carried to us. And let’s celebrate the new wineskin with its expansive fermentation. Let’s do both. We don’t have to choose.
So what if we are losing our privileged place in society? We never did our best work there anyway. We’re always our best on the bottom or the edge. This is a great time to remember the saints and mystics who founded our traditions, the ones who did their work from the margins.
Because—and I say this with more love than I can name—we can’t afford to keep squabbling about things like buildings, budgets, pews, stoles, handbells, praise bands, and carpet…. We must stop that at once. God needs all hands on deck. We cannot continue operating as if we are a private club with members, dues, and privileges. Why? Because Jesus never acts like that. Our neighbors need us. God needs us. We need us too.
I know it’s hard to play and be creative when we feel fearful. Anxiety takes the spring out of our step…. We don’t have to be afraid. That is the wonderful news. God’s love casts out fear. God is with us. With us! God orchestrates systems change. Change happens all the time so that every generation, every community, every person can experience God in their world, their context, their time.
Heath imagines the possibilities on the other side of our anxiety:
Beloved church, can we agree to let God have our anxiety? God knows how hard it is for us to let go. We simply have to be willing to be made willing. Just a tiny degree of openness allows God to work with us—like dandelion seeds. They blow on the wind, fall into every crack … and before you know it a parking lot is in full bloom. Church, do you realize we are on the cusp of a new Great Awakening? And it looks like a spiritual dandelion explosion as far as the eye can see. God’s new thing is networked, exponential, Spirit-breathed, decentralized, a vast planting of small communities of faith…. It is very much the work of laypeople, and it is emerging as a natural progression out of the church that used to be….
I know if we will say yes to God, we can rely on God’s already having said yes to us. So let’s go together, all of us, in the direction that God leads. When that happens, the world will know that Jesus spoke the truth, that God’s love is for everyone. People will encounter the real tradition, the tradition behind the tradition, because they will experience it in us.
Reference:
Elaine A. Heath, God Unbound: Wisdom from Galatians for the Anxious Church (Upper Room Books, 2016), 97–100.
Praises and Prayers
Bethany Hill is scheduled for hip replacement surgery January 9th.
Sterling Smith has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
We express sympathy to Christie Taylor on the death of her husband, Seth, January 1st.
