Identity

Vision and Values

Missio Dei

    We believe that it is God’s plan to bring glory to Himself through the creation, fall, and ultimate salvation of humanity through the redemptive work of His Son Jesus Christ by power of the Holy Spirit.  God initiates the Gospel mission through the sending of His Son in the power of the Spirit into the world, to save the lost. 

The Gospel

    The essential content of the Gospel is God Himself.  The good news is that God has brought a community into Himself to pour out His blessings upon them so that they might ultimately praise His glory.  The good news that Jesus is risen is the shortest way to speak the Gospel.  The resurrection of Jesus proclaims the reality that the One who delivered Israel from Egypt is the same One who raised Jesus from the tomb and is the same One who sends His Spirit for the total salvation of the church. 

The Gospel and the Church

    The purpose of the church, existing as Christ’s body on the earth until His return, is to spread this Gospel to all peoples.  The Church is not so much the agent of the mission as the locus of the mission.  It is God who works, drawing people to Christ.  When they are drawn, they become part of the community.

    The Gospel is the light that spreads into darkness.  Where the Gospel has not gone, there it must go.  Where there is material poverty, the Gospel comes as the loving Christ who feeds and heals.  Where there is spiritual poverty, the Gospel comes as the loving Christ who forgives and saves.  Where there is both material and spiritual poverty, the comes as the loving Christ who transforms the entire person.

    The church, as Christ’s body now in the world, seeks the spread of the Gospel where it is less represented.  Every church must prayerfully wonder, where, within our reach, is the suffering, where are the greatest needs, where is the Gospel least represented?  We see American urban centers abandoned and dissolving into utter chaos - the perfect place for the church.   Jesus took our poverty upon Himself, lived in the flesh in our ghetto.  His incarnational model is the only hope for ministry among America’s urban poor.  We must share lives with those we seek to reach, live with them, suffer loss with them, face the struggles they face.

    We recognize the present difference between the level of American poverty, both spiritually and materially as vastly different from the world’s poor.  If we stay here, we will structure our time, energy, and lives to needs in our own community but a large portion of material wealth sent to support the mission work among the truly unreached and those devastated with life ending poverty.

A Church Planting Church

    If the Gospel is something that spreads, if Jesus’ model for ministry is to incarnate ourselves in of the community we are reaching, then we believe that church planting churches are the best model.  Rather than a church growing larger and larger, it’s members becoming less and less incarnationally connected to the neighborhoods they come from, it’s resources and infrastructure becoming increasingly inwardly focused, we see a church that is constantly preparing for its next opportunity to multiply. 

    Because our goal is to plant churches in areas of other cultures and decreasing financial resources, we must project a sustainable model for the next church.  Our goal is not to have a cultureless church, which is impossible anyway, but to be able to understand, live, and communicate what is essential of a church, that which can translate across any socio-economic and cultural differences.

A Church in Weakness

    By focusing our ministries toward the poor, we believe we are serving both groups of people in our larger community – the rich and the poor.  The greatest act of obedience and worship Christians in America can perform is realizing our place in redistributing God’s wealth among the poor.  We provide an opportunity and equipping for rich Christians to do that.   We also believe an increasing number of people are losing their taste for opulent living and are recognizing God’s unique calling for Americans to use their vast resources to meet the desperate needs of the world’s poor.  We believe an increasing number of Christians are losing their taste for a commodity approach where church is something they choose to best serve them and are instead looking for a church they can give their lives for.

    People will not be attracted to our church because we are place to find all their needs met.  Our church will be a place where in giving your life you’ll find it, in serving you will be strengthened.  As a church planting church, our weaknesses and needs will always outweigh our abilities and provisions.  In a culture that glorifies individualism and self-glorification beyond limit, we are individuals that live first for the benefit of a “weak” community and for the glory of our head, Christ. 

Unity and Diversity

    A divided church is a contradiction. We will exist to contradict the contradiction.  Apart from language and geography, we find no reason that the local church should not be as diverse as the neighborhood it lives in.  In our culture with a long history of racially segregated churches and the current trend to further splinter churches into special interest groups, we are heading in the opposite direction.  There is no reason the church in any location should not reflect the diverse representations socio/economic, racial, cultural, generational.  In a segregated society, the church of any community must declare that Jesus breaks down walls of division.  We must never actively exclude a group, we must actively seek to express diversity in our expressions of the Gospel.  A gospel that does not reconcile is no gospel at all.

    That said, we recognize the beauty which God has made in our diverse world and in the diversity that will be heaven.  Our community will be intentionally structured to celebrate both the unity and diversity of God’s people.  To ignore diversity in culture, age, gender, custom, ethnicity, and background not only ignores God’s creative glory, but also trivializes the real differences and needs each group has.  There are times when dividing to recognize and address our different needs, experiences, and perceptions of reality can be a great benefit to the smaller parts within the larger body.

Worship

    Mission is a means to an end.  Worship is no means to anything, it is an end itself.  Glorifying God is the end for which we were created.  We value remembering, proclaiming and experiencing the character and acts of God in speech, in song, in deed. We believe worship is different for people in different cultures and contexts.  We believe in our current context as Christians in America, that we are at risk of God’s judgment for our “worship” in which we have neglected greater expressions of worship, i.e. how we serve the poor, protect the orphan, etc.  We exist to communicate worship as something done with our whole lives, especially how seek justice and compassion. 

    Because of our commitment to the shared unity in Christ, our expressions of worship will be as diverse as our members and those we are seeking to reach.  We recognize that in worship, we join presently together with the saints throughout all time and space, the entire church.  We will also do what we can to express the Gospel in ways which bridge barriers among Christians of various denominational backgrounds.  We think we have much to learn from other Christians through time and space, we value current and ancient expressions of worship.

Small Groups

    We believe the Gospel is powerfully proclaimed in actual relationships.  Life Group are our place for the growth of authentic intentional discipling relationships.  Life Groups are also missional communities, seeking to draw in the lonely and those cut off from the life giving hope of the Gospel.  The idea is that Life Groups will be the building blocks for future church plants.

Prayer

    Prayer is our confession that we depend on God as the ultimate source of life; we can accomplish nothing good without The Father’s initiative.  Our church must center our life in prayer and pray knowing that everything we seek for God depends on His powerful accomplishment of it.

Church as a Channel of Grace

    The church is the place or people where God dwells to bring us to enter the kingdom of heaven, for it is the gate of heaven.   We are, as Christ’s body, the main channel by which He communicates His grace for salvation.  In the sacraments, through the gifts of the members, in the proclamation of His Word, through the common practice of the disciplines, in prayer for one another, God is applying the redemptive work of His Son toward our salvation.

    The church on earth is at the same time the fruit, but nevertheless, also the instrument of salvation.  God is gathering the church through the Gospel and, at the same time, the gathered church is the instrument to further the Gospel.  The church is therefore God’s main channel by which He communicates salvation to the world.  As the church, we call people to conversion, but we believe that conversion as a long process of being baptismally engrafted into a new people, an alternative polis, a countercultural social structure called church. 

Church and Culture

    We are a confessing, visible church in which our most credible witness is the creation of a new humanity – a living breathing community of faith.  We seek to influence the world by being the church, that is, by being something the world is not and can never be, lacking the gift of faith and vision, which is ours in Christ.  Christian ethics are tradition dependent and arise out of the formation of the peculiar community engendered by listening to Scripture and attaching ourselves to a master like Jesus.

    Our church is determined to worship God alone, in all things, irregardless of the results.  This is not to say that we are not concerned with results, but is a confession that it is God who makes us grow, it is God who gives us the rules, which are based on what God is doing in the world to bring about God’s good results.  We are church of the cross.  We expect hostility from the world.  The cross is not defeat for the church, but revolutionary participation in Christ’s victory over the powers He opposes.

    The existence of the church is the proclamation of the Gospel.  We will focus on faithfulness, worshipping Christ in all things, trusting God has shown us the way to live as a church, trusting that the existence of the church will bring about God’s good results.  For the church, to be the church is our highest principle.