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Contact: Pastor Scott Stewart
When Grace Foothills recently opened the doors of the Tryon Theater for its first worship service at 10:30 a.m. Sunday, some people might have been tempted to see incongruity: church in a theater?
But Scott Stewart wasn’t one of those people. As pastor of the new congregation, Stewart believes it is a perfect symbolic intersection between faith and culture, the seeker and believer, and the common ground we all share through beauty and art as image bearers of God.
“Grace Foothills is founded on the idea that the gospel is for the non-believer and the believer. The gospel not only brings us to faith, but we also grow in faith through the gospel. This means that grace drives who we are and how we relate to God and one another.
“We desire to create an authentic place where a person can come who struggles with life, possesses doubts and fears, and just doesn’t have it together,” Stewart says.
While holding onto biblical integrity, Grace Foothills sheds the competing ideas of religion and relativism. “The reality of grace frees us from the idea of religious moralism and irreligious relativism. Grace Foothills believes church should be about the dynamic process of faith and not the static enslavement of rules. Grace offers us the possibility of living a life of love for God and neighbor out of a changed heart of gratitude and humility.”
Grace Foothills is unique in other ways, Stewart says. “We are another congregation of an existing church located in Fletcher called Grace Centre, which is co-pastored by Dave Desforge and Josiah Bancroft. The leadership of Grace desires to plant new churches in western North Carolina with a grace-centered perspective and an emphasis on the arts, so they have adopted a model of church planting called ‘one church/multiple congregations.’ Another way to put that might be to say we are one church in many locations.”
The Foothills congregation will share many elements with Grace Centre – core values, the “same DNA,” an emphasis on the arts, the same elders and leadership, central administration, budget, and several staff people. The core values that define Grace, which are listed on shared bulletins and websites, are: biblical, grateful, interdependent, honest, dependent, hopeful, and creative.
At the same time, Stewart says, the Foothills congregation will not be a clone of Grace Centre:
“Our congregation will develop our own style of music, art, and caring for our community that will be congruent with the culture of the foothills.”
A core group of about 30 people have been meeting in a house in Tryon since last October, says Stewart, previously a youth pastor for 12 years with a Masters in Divinity from Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte.
“Those core people have relationships extending back for years. Many of our folks have been going to Grace Centre in Mills River for two to three years or longer,” Stewart says. “Pretty soon, they began to bump into one another and say, ‘Oh you live in Tryon, or you live in Columbus, or you live in Landrum’.” Leadership at Grace Centre took notice. Because these families were driving 45 minutes, it was a natural fit that they should form their own congregation. Early last spring one of the elders led the group through a class in Galations in Tryon. Stewart was brought on in May to pastor the congregation. After months of preparation and planning, the church will open the doors to the community Sunday.
“We’re excited to be finally started,” Scott says. “This is a great way to extend the Gospel as a church. There is still once church, one leadership and shared resources and, of course, the same Grace values. At the same time, we have the opportunity to be unique in the context of our own local culture, a community we love very much. Personally, I’m thrilled to be a part of a church that believes the gospel of grace has the power to bring the non-believer to life and set the believer free.”
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