Pastor Emily Ridout walks our community through the second message of Advent 2019. The other side of the Christmas story sometimes includes the loss of loved ones, jobs, illnesses, & waiting spaces. View this message for a reflection and encouragement to find hope in the dark and be reminded that where there is light, darkness cannot exist!

Dream Again is the last Sunday conversation in the Twenty-Year celebration series.  Pastor Baly said, “SVA started with a God sized dream.” Do you have God-sized dreams?  God has hard-wired us to be dreamers and He desires for exceed our wildest imaginations.  We can know when our dreams are God defined dreams when we can see that we need His help. To hear more about what needs to take place in our lives to be sensitive to His leading with God-sized dreams, listen to conversation four, Dream Again.

Faithfulness is a reflection on how God has been faithful as we celebrate SVA’s twentieth Anniversary.  The implication for us is to follow His faithfulness, not just in the big things but the mundane things of life that no one sees.  This has a wide-ranging impact in three areas that God will use to impact our life and the lives of those around us when we are faithful.  To hear more about the faithfulness God desires, listen to conversation two, Faithfulness.

November 3rd is the launch of our Twenty-Year anniversary celebration and Gratitude is the first Sunday conversation of this four-week series that includes some moving video highlights of the SVA over the years. Pastor Monty used two quotes of Caleb from the Old Testament, who said “The Lord has kept me alive” and “Give me this mountain.” We are trusting and praising in God the same now, as we did twenty years ago, and trusting He will continue to move and expand His presence in our valley going forward. To hear more, listen to conversation 1: Gratitude.

Learning to Love is the last Sunday Conversation in the All The Feels series.  Pastor Monty leads this conversation by challenging us to grow in our emotional maturity by learning to love others well.  The telling litmus test is whether we are “descending” in how we express our maturity and it is this counter cultural approach that Jesus says will transform us.  To hear more about what this means and how we can practice this type of emotional maturity, listen to conversation 7, Learning to Love.

Our mindset in culture today is over-commitment. If we are not busy, we feel guilty, yet, this was not what God has planned for us. Rest is a gift with God, which He describes as a Sabbath, but it requires some resistance in order to do it the way He intended for us. Pastor Kristin walks through four elements of this gift of rest with God as a celebration. To hear more about how you can enjoy this celebration of rest as God’s gift for you, listen to conversation six, White Space.

Peter Scazzero said, “Grief and loss are meant to enlarge your soul.”  The key with this message is how God will use the holy emptying of grief and grieving to do four important things in our life if we allow Him to do that work within us.  To hear more work God desires to do within us, listen to conversation 5, Losing it.

Part of our journey in growing deeper in Christ is experiencing The Wall.  The Wall is what results when the size of our suffering exceeds the size of our faith and there is a crisis of disorientation.  Have you been there? Maybe you are doing through this now. God desires that we move through this and when we do we experience transformation.  To hear more about how you can experience this kind of transformation, listen to conversation four, The Wall.

In It’s So Unfair! Pastor Kristin talks about the cascading impact of our sins on the people around us and how other’s sins and actions can negatively impact us as well. The key is breaking out of the destructive cycle of unfairness through God’s grace that He willingly desires to share with us. To hear more about God’s disproportionately greater offering of grace to overcome the consequences of sin in your life, listen to conversation three, It’s So Unfair!

Starting to Feel is the second Sunday conversation in the All That Feels series. In this message, Pastor Monty said we have a choice in our feelings and the power that raised Jesus from the dead is the one the Father desires for us to seek to be our true self. To hear more about what our true self can be, listen to conversation 2, Starting to Feel.