We are a Worshipping Community - Encountering Jesus

• Genuine worship is a response to our personal encounters with God and his creation.

• Biblical expressions of worship respond both to God’s desire that his name be glorified andto his longing for intimate relationship with human beings.

Scripture forms the foundation of our understanding of who God is and how he acts but we can never really know him without experiencing him firsthand. 

• We recognize that vibrant personal worship experience enhances the gathered worship experience. In turn a genuine experience of God in the gathered setting fosters life in our personal worship experience

• Intercession, prayer and the prophetic are active expressions of our encounters with the presence of the Holy Spirit and are to be found in both personal and gathered worship.

• Our worship is often best expressed through the medium of art. Cultivating the artistic facets of our being develops our expression of worship.

 We are a Discipling Community - Growing Together

We are a Missional Community - Living with Purpose

• The mission of the church is to bring people into community with God and others.

• When a community is not driven by programs but is, rather, consumed by a passion for Jesus and sustained by vision and relationship, then initiative to advance the Kingdom of God is experienced in ordinary people.

• The church is about the chosen many, not the anointed few (I Peter 2:9). The role of leadership serves the community by equipping people to be the priests God has intended them to be. The gift of leadership recognizes and makes room for the other gifts. When the gift of leadership is functioning healthily, the church flourishes.

• All of life is sacred. The Kingdom of God advances as we live with Kingdom purpose in the most ordinary moments of life.

• God gave humanity abilities to serve one another in various ways and spheres. All occupations are of equal value and can be a context through which a believer can Glorify God and carry out his mission (e.g. farmer, pastor, politician, artist, shop keeper, nurse, teacher, evangelist )

• The Kingdom of God is “near” us and we must learn how to reach for it in our daily lives. Jesus in Luke 4:18-20 defined for us this activity. He called us to a life of dependence, compassion, generosity and supernatural power to set the captives free and heal the oppressed.

• Jesus called us to the least and lost. He invited us to join him at the expanding edge of the Kingdom - the marginalized and the vulnerable.

• Christian community is inclusive and breaks down social barriers of injustice in its mission.

• Our community is to be marked by cross-generational and cross-cultural connectedness, so that no generation will be orphaned and no culture alienated among us.

• God is community. We are born separated from that community. This spiritual disconnection means that in the deepest part of us we feel detached and unknown.

• Community involves connecting. When we invite the Spirit of God to make his home in us, his central job is connecting us with God and then others. God is our first community and our first place of connection for life and growth.

• Living things, given the right environment, will grow and reproduce. This community is an environment that encourages and sustains spiritual growth and reproduction. We believe that receptivity to the presence of the Holy Spirit, the spoken truth of God’s Word, and a climate of self disclosure and open, honest dialogue combine to produce spiritual growth.

• We are intended to grow in community, not in isolation. Rugged individualism, independence and chosen isolation are in complete opposition to community and connecting.

• Discipleship is not the task only of professional ministers or priests. Every child of God is commissioned to make disciples of all nations.

• Spiritual growth necessitates both our choice and God’s sovereign initiative. Jesus calls us to choose a lifestyle of following him; but that choice is always made in response to an encounter with his sovereign, in-breaking Kingdom.

• The goal of spiritual growth is spiritual maturity. Being fully alive describes the core of what it means to be spiritual mature. The process to becoming fully alive requires that we see God and then us clearer. That clarity gives way to a more truthful view of others, society and creation.

• The role of the Old Testament priest (Exodus 19:6) was to help bridge the gap between creator God and created human. The New Testament (I Peter 2:9) places this priestly responsibility on every Christian. We are truly a “Kingdom of Priests”.

• To be a discipling community means we must first be an equipping community. To live out the vision of Jesus, “go and make disciples,” requires that the people of God must be equipped and empowered to that end. Training and releasing people to live out the words and works of Jesus is essential to a discipling community.