Two Year
Ministry Plan

Using our voices to praise God and affirm our beliefs through worship is an integral part of the Christian life. It is certainly a facet of the church that is more difficult during quarantine! However, we are excited to see the creative ways our people are using technology to keep worshiping God together.

Our Living Room Worship Sessions are one exciting opportunity to come together as God’s people and praise him for his goodness. We are thankful for those who are leading these sessions, and we hope you will take advantage of being able to worship from your home!

To stay connected with Grace Church and learn about current Covid-19 updates, click below.

Hey, church family! As meeting together over our phones and computers is feeling a little normal now, we are thankful that we are able to stay connected. We love to see the church together during these times—even if it has to be over a computer screen.  

Grace family, thank you for uniting together and finding ways to meet together virtually. The church is not comprised of buildings but of people—we are grateful to be in this with you. Please refer to our COVID-19 response page for all church updates and communication from our leadership team, dated by when we announced each. Hopefully, this will help answer any questions you may have!

Our next ministry partner is Project HOPE Foundation, an organization that offers a lifespan of services to individuals on the autism spectrum and their families.

Quick Facts:

-1 in 59 children is diagnosed on the autism spectrum.

-Grace and Project HOPE working together:

1) We have committed to giving Project Hope Foundation (PHF) $100K/year for two years.

2) PHF offers services at seven locations across the Upstate, including one Grace campus, and hopefully a second in 2020.

3) More than 200 Grace members from all ten campuses helped clean and paint the PHF school in Landrum last year.

-You can learn more about Project HOPE by clicking below!

Our first ministry partner out of four is Jump Start, a discipleship ministry that serves current prisoners in 17 South Carolina state prisons and also assists former prisoners with re-entry to society.

Quick Facts:

-96% of people who complete both the inside and outside programs do not return to prison.

-Grace and JumpStart working together:

1) We have committed to giving JumpStart $112K/year for two years.

2) We share staff: Inside Program Director of Jump Start, Cary Sanders, also works on Grace Outreach staff.

-You can volunteer with Jump Start by clicking below!

We have a team in Puerto Rico this week specifically working on earthquake relief through construction and care. They are helping build temporary structures and counseling many individuals and families who have lost their homes. Please be in prayer for them and especially for the families we are serving there.

What is your job title?
My job title is GroupLife Women’s Minister at Harrison Bridge!

How did you get to Grace?
We got to Grace by friends inviting us. We visited once when services were held in the Student Center then started attending regularly the first Sunday the “new” Worship Center opened.

What do you enjoy most about your job?
Shepherding and discipling women. I love building relationships with people!

What campus do you attend and what is your favorite thing about it?
Harrison Bridge. I want everyone to know how loving, resilient, and giving we are. So many incredible God stories and life change!

What are you most excited about right now?
What I am most excited about right now is our new campus pastor and the direction our campus is going! Re:gen is coming to Harrison Bridge this summer so I’m super excited about this ministry bringing life change to so many.

What is one interesting thing about you?
I grew up in a house next to the funeral home where my dad worked. We had a ghost named Aunt Bersha—for real!

As a church, we believe it is crucial to take a look back at how God has been working in the past as we move forward into the future. One way we do this is through a digital document called our "Year in Review" that walks you through everything that has happened in the life of our church in the past year. It is exciting, humbling, and encouraging! If you haven't gotten a chance to scroll through it yet, click below.

Continuing our recently-started three-year Grace Institute Nicaragua in Chinandega, Tom Fowler has returned for the week to train approximately 70 pastors and leaders. Tom is leading the participants through two studies: 1) Study of the Holy Spirit; and 2) Bibliology - A Study of Biblical Doctrine. These classes continue to lay the foundation for the curriculum to be executed over the next 36 months. Please pray for Tom and all the students who participate.

We are so excited for the opening of Jasmine Kitchen! Jasmine Road, one of our ministry partners, will open a restaurant this month, providing job training, employment, and career-building opportunities to survivors of sexual exploitation and addiction.

Jasmine Road is South Carolina's first two-year residential program for adult women survivors of human trafficking, prostitution, and addiction. You can find out more about Jasmine Kitchen and Jasmine Road below. 

We thought it would be fun for you to get to know some of our staff that you may not run into at your campus! Get to know Madei a little! ⬇️
What is your job title? Graphic Designer
What do you enjoy most about your job? Making Matt Williams' teaching slides every week. ;) But really, I most enjoy working with our awesome Communications team and pitching in on print layout projects where I get to bring to life ideas from our campus and ministry staff in engaging and interesting ways.
What campus do you attend and what is your favorite thing about it? Travelers Rest! We just joined a new TR community group this year and it meets two doors down from our house—now that’s local community! Not only is it convenient, but our group has been amazingly vulnerable, real, and intentional with each other in just a few short weeks.
What are you most excited about right now? Watching my two-year-old and my nine-month-old begin to play together—their giggles are just about the best sound in the world!
What is one interesting thing about you? Being from New Orleans, I was a princess in a Mardi Gras parade when I was eleven, so basically, I’m royalty.
What is your favorite of the series graphics that you've made for Grace? Probably the one I made for the Citizens series because it was the first one I ever created! I still remember where I was in 2015 when my boss called and asked me to make it.

This past weekend, we held our first annual Camp Impact Junior Staff Christmas Party in Allendale County. Junior Staff members (ages 12-17) are from the Allendale community and serve at Camp Impact during the summer, while also taking leadership, life skills, and bible classes for six weeks.

Nine volunteers from Grace Church attended the event. After sharing a meal and celebrating with Christmas games, we broke into gender-specific small groups, where we introduced Men's Roundtable and Ezer curriculum to these students for the first time!

As an extension of the last decade of ministry in Kenya, we have been working with our partner, Bernard Karubu, to expand our ministry into nearby Rwanda to help train and equip other pastors there. We are excited about ministries in three African countries (including our members, the Nelsons, living in Cape Verde) meeting together and the ways God is using our service and relationships in Kenya to meet needs and provide similar training in Rwanda. Watch the video below for more details.

Bernard also runs our OVC Kenya program as we continue to make efforts to care for orphans and vulnerable children. If you are interested in helping with this program, here's how you can help: We need 8-10 more advocates for our OVC high school and college-aged children. High school support is $50/month and college support is $100/month, and we ask advocates to commit for the duration of the student's schooling. You can apply to be an advocate below.

Grace Church foster families recently attended special training on Trust-Based Relational Intervention by Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development. This training was aimed towards not only helping foster parents understand the relationship histories of children from “hard places" but also to give parents tools to move forward and deepen connections with them. This training will be moderated by Kelly Childress, a practitioner of Trust-Based Relational Intervention who was trained at the Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development. Goals for this training were to: gain knowledge and insight about what secure attachment looks like between children and caregivers, learn helpful ways to build a connection with children who come from hard places and did not have secure attachment, understand the impact attachment history can have on children’s behavior, gain insight and awareness about how our own attachment history influences the way we care for children, and learn appropriate proactive strategies to empower children with behavioral tools.

On November 11, over 100 of our church family gathered together to learn more about one of our ministry partners, Homes of Hope, and how we can serve them.

Homes of Hope is working to provide foundational, safe environments for low to moderate-income families in the Upstate. By providing affordable, energy-efficient rental and homeownership options, their clients can now afford housing and power bills. Supplemented by Homes of Hope’s financial wellness program, affordable housing gives families the freedom of a disposable income so that they can begin saving and investing.

At Meet Homes of Hope, we shared several opportunities to serve with this ministry. If you missed the night and are interested in serving, click below.

That's a wrap on Fusion, 24Seven, and Forge Fall Weekends! Each ministry had a weekend retreat together where they spent time playing games, worshiping, sitting under biblical teaching geared towards their age group, and hanging out with their small groups at host homes. 5th-6th grade students learned about the power of our words to bring life or bring death, 7th-8th grade talked through their identity and significance that can only be truly found in Jesus, and our high school students were taught on humility and what it looks like to find freedom from performance in what Christ has already done for us. All the teaching from Fall Weekends is now available to you! Click below to watch.

When most people think of Mosaic, our ministry to those in our church family with special needs, they mostly think of our ministry on Sundays to adults, students, and children. However, we have the joy of serving adults and students during the week, as well. One of those components is our monthly supper club! Each month, a different community group brings dinner and joins our students and adults for fellowship and a meal together. This gives parents of adults and students with disabilities time to go out to dinner, and it gives our church family time to fellowship together. One of the goals is for our families with disabilities to feel supported and be strengthened by the community they have with each other and with our church as a whole. To learn more or figure out how you can volunteer, contact Madison Carithers, administrative assistant for Mosaic, at [email protected].

A couple of weeks ago, Grace hosted a breakfast for the Greenville Behavioral Health Coalition. This was a great time to learn about how to remove barriers related to mental health stigma and access to care. Faith leaders from across the Upstate were able to come together as one to hear from educators and speakers on this crucial topic. Leaders were also equipped with varying community resources at information desks that helped to broaden everyone's support network.