Communion, Community, Commission

These 3 words sum up our core values, our core commitments, out of which flow our core practices.  To the best of our understanding, these are what make a church, a church. 

Communion speaks to our relationship with Jesus.

We believe that God revealed Himself in the person of Jesus Christ.  We can have communion (fellowship, relationship) with God through the person and work of Jesus.  Jesus didn’t come, nearly 2000 years ago, to start a new religion, but rather to inform us about reality, and to teach us how to live in that reality.  The reality is that this is not a “human-centric” world we live in (as much as our culture/society might say otherwise), but a “God-centric” world.  That being the case, we seek (albeit imperfectly) to live, individually and communally, with God at the center of it all.  He is deserving of our ultimate allegiance, our undying love, and the best we have to offer in service to Him.  In so doing, we become all that we are meant to be…we become more fully human, more fully alive.

Community speaks to our relationship with one another.

We believe that we are members of one family, one body, one team.  We are much more interconnected and interdependent with one another than we often realize.  Love of one another, as hard and messy as it can be, ought to be our chief characteristic.  What we’ve found is that the biggest obstacle to loving others is ourselves.  We can be selfish and self-absorbed, we can be full of fear, stress, confusion, doubt…all relatively human traits.  But we want to be a community in which all are accepted, no matter how broken (and we’re all broken), and all will be encouraged and supported as we try to live as Jesus taught us.

Commission speaks to our relationship with the world around us.

Jesus taught us to pray, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name, Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:9).  We are less concerned about the after-life, i.e. going to heaven (we figure God’s got that under control), and more concerned about living the life of heaven here and now (which is what He’s called us to strive for).  So what does that look like?  Admittedly, we are just beginning to get our imaginations around this.  But using the Bible as our guide (and we believe that we are called to be the continuation of the Biblical story) we are coming to understand this to mean: justice for the poor, oppressed, disadvantaged; access to basic needs for all people; access to the gospel (the message that Jesus is Lord and He loves us) for all people; opportunity to know, love, and worship God, and be part of His family.

May God continue to stretch our imaginations in all these areas, and lead us toward consistency, integrity, and continual teach-ability.