•	Who leads SGCM?
•	Why are you called Sovereign Grace Church?
•	Is Sovereign Grace Church part of a denomination?

Gospel and Culture

In our country we have a long history of hundreds of years where Christianity has played a prominent part in influencing the culture in which we live. Our institutions from schools, through to government has promoted Christian values and non-Christian belief and behaviour for centuries has been condemned. However, though people may have been “Christianised” historically by tour culture, often it wasn’t a biblical, new birth Christianity. And so, for many generations in this country, in large measure the church’s job has been to challenge people from mere outward, institutional forms of Christianity into a vital, living relationship with Jesus.

There were advantages to living in “Christian” Britain. There was a common, acceptable standard of morality, a basic understanding of “good” and “bad”. The problem was that such morality without gospel-changed hearts often led to hypocrisy and a harsh self-righteousness. Think for example of how the average small valleys community treated the unwed mother or the homosexual person.

We now live in a predominantly non-Christian culture. However, the tendency has often been for the church to fail to adapt to the new situation. It still assumes that the same “God consciousness” prevails as in previous generations and that people will simply show up at their church services. Some churches certainly “do” evangelism as one ministry among many but generally it has failed to adapt and reform absolutely everything it does so as to be engaged with the non-Christian society around it.

In the welsh valleys there still exists some remnants, generally among an older generation, of an old “Christian” value driven society. What is clear is that this is a shrinking population. We believe that if the church does not learn to adapt to a new culture it will decline and die. There are a number of gospel-loving, doctrinally sound churches still in existence and for that we are grateful. However, we are convinced that when Christians focus on the gospel and the church but forget the culture in which they are desiring to present their message they lose the ability to connect with those people around them and can easily find themselves living in an isolated Christian bubble, only venturing outside of their Christian ghetto through necessity.

This involvement in culture may sound like involvement in sin, but there is a vital difference between culture and worldliness. Jesus intended that we should be active participants in our culture without entering into the sin of our culture. It does not mean dancing as close to sin as possible without crossing the line, but rather dancing as close to sinners as possible by crossing the lines that unnecessarily separate the people God has found from those he is seeking.

Our goal at SGCM is to renew our passion for presenting the good news of Jesus to our culture, embracing those aspects of culture that are good and working towards the redemption of that which has been distorted by sin. The less we are involved in our culture, the less we will feel compelled by the need of Christ in our culture; and the less we see the need of Christ in our culture, the less passion we have to be involved in culture for the sake of the gospel.

Our focus is less on the ‘church’ as the institution doing evangelism and more on the church as an organism of believers being missionaries in culture; engaging culture yet embodying counter-culture. That is, enjoying relationships, using money, engaging in work and leisure the way God intended and has prescribed through the gospel.