Compassionate Evangelism

Welcome to the Saxon Road Church website. We hope you will find helpful information about what we call compassionate evangelism. If you're looking for a church family, please know that you are always welcome to join us in Watkinsville, Georgia, or sign up as a Virtual Member and stay in touch.

At Saxon Road Church, love for God and one another is our only basis for gathering. We want everyone, especially those who may feel out of place in other churches, to feel at home in ours. It seems that many prominent churches nowadays are at odds with the compassion Christ preached and the life he led. Instead of feeling welcome to fellowship with simple and common people from all walks of life, many people feel rejected in churches where the judgment of religious leaders has set a harsh standard.

For some of us at Saxon Road Church, our lives also once revolved around judging others according to the letter of religious laws. We too bore little, if any, resemblance to the common people and social outcasts who followed Jesus around. In churches where we were brought up, people learned to be judgmental and not tolerate those who believe differently. The letter of the Law of Moses determined what was right and wrong and the only love we knew was tough love. Fornicators and homosexuals were hell bound, followed by adulterers, drunks, thieves, liars and the like. We believed most people who were misfortunate and down on hard times were paying for their sins, or the sins of their fathers, and largely had only themselves to blame. We were full of religion and couldn't wait for Jesus to return and reward us for our hard work and clean living.

We realized, of course, that we were not perfect. But, we expected Jesus to show us compassion and forgiveness - just not the kind we gave others. We expected the kind you get when you've failed a million times and still haven't changed some of the things that need changing most. In our hearts, we didn't really believe Jesus would treat us as we had treated others.

As students of the Bible, we concentrated on fine tuning our righteousness. We studied whether Jesus would come back before, during or after the Great Tribulation, whether salvation could be lost, how old the earth is, can divorced people re-marry, is chewing tobacco and saying dang it a sin, should I finance my car or pay cash as a good steward of God's riches, is speaking in tongues of God or of the devil, should we give tithes based on our income before or after taxes, and who God would want us to vote for. In reality, our lives were completely focused on adorning ourselves with self-righteousness, gaining scholarly knowledge, and giving to others so that we could receive much more in return.

Evangelism has become more about getting people on the church rolls than about meeting their needs. Many preachers are living well off the tithes and offerings of those who cannot afford to pay their own bills. Their poor congregations continue to give their money hoping that God, as their shepherds preach, will open windows of mercy and heal their bank accounts.

At times, we could hear a distant voice telling us we were going the wrong way. It sounded like the same voice we heard in our hearts when we walked the isle and joined the church for the first time. It never quit telling us to repent and go a different direction. Our lives, however, filled up with so much spiritual noise after becoming involved with church. We couldn't hear God telling us through the Bible and in our hearts that we were missing more than just a few spiritual details. We thought we were building our house on a Rock when we weren't even standing on the Rock. Like scribes and Pharisees, we were just mainly acquiring the kind of outward self-righteousness that comes from religion. Missing was the overwhelming compassion for others, which drove Christ to lay aside religious laws and traditions, embrace publicans and harlots as his friends, and teach others Judge not, that you be not judged.

Our lives began to change in 1988, when we decided to lay traditional churches aside for awhile, meet with a few friends, and start reading the Bible anew. As best we could, we tried not to give in to all the pre-conditioning of what we had been taught since we were little children. Progress was painfully slow. We had so much to unlearn before we could even begin to take in anything fundamentally new. It took almost 15 years for the simple truth of the Gospel to really sink in. Serving God isn't about doctrines and commandments - it is altogether wholly and completely about love. It was right there all along and we had read it so many times. All the law and the prophets are fulfilled in one word, Love your neighbor as yourself. We thought we understood and believed it, yet our actions spoke louder than our words and showed that we were not headed in the right direction.

We attribute most of what we have learned to people God has brought into our lives along the way, many of whom are now a big part of Saxon Road Church. Some of these people you would have never found in the kinds of churches we were accustomed to attending. We put this website together with their help. We hope it will help others take a new look at some of the same scriptures they've read and heard all their lives and see them differently.

We sincerely hope that viewing the Bible solely with the wide-open eyes of love, rather than the blinded eyes of the law, will change your lives as much as it has ours. Hopefully, you can in your own special way find that same road we found to the other side. There, all of the guilt and burden of the law will give way to joy, peace, and - most of all - the same love for one another that God has for each of us.

Sincerely yours,

Your friends and neighbors at Saxon Road Church