OUR CORE VALUES
GOSPEL-FUELED WORSHIP
Whether we realize it or not, worship is related to every aspect of our lives. We have no neutral desires or actions; everything we do is an expression of worship. We are always either spending our worship in awe of creator God or we are wasting our worship in pursuit of lesser created things. The bible teaches us that we were created to eat, drink, speak, and work to the glory of God. As such, we want to every aspect of our lives to be lived in worship of God as we consider how deeply the gospel has affected us (Genesis 1:26-27; 1 Corinthians 10:31; 2 Corinthians 5:14-15).
Although worship can’t be reduced to a single time or place, we believe that a worshipful life is cultivated through the gathering of believers in a corporate gathering. At these gatherings, we want to facilitate the experience of God’s grace by centering on the gospel in our preaching, teaching, singing, sharing, praying, giving, reciting of creeds and celebration of the ordinances. Each affords us the opportunity to remember, receive, rejoice in and respond to God’s love with sincerity and passion (Psalm 145:1-21, Isaiah 43:6-7, Colossians 3:1-17).
GOSPEL-EMPOWERED COMMUNITY
A gospel-empowered community is not a perfect community. It doesn’t meet all your needs or live up to all your expectations, and it shouldn’t. It is instead a community of sinners forgiven by Christ that believes it is better together under Jesus than each individual is alone. It’s a people that Jesus had freed and is freeing to value substance over appearance, humility over self-centeredness, building up over picking apart, and corporately leaning into the good news rather than just good advice.
To grow into this, we gather to study the truth of God’s Word, be transparent in confession, exercise trust in Christ, and seek transformation by the Spirit. To battle our natural tendency to keep people at a distance we believe in consistent intimate gatherings as the primary means by which God does and will build us into a repentant community of radical disciples (Acts 2:44-47; Hebrews 10:24,25).
GOSPEL-DRIVEN MULTIPLICATION
The Great Mission of the Church is to make disciples. Jesus himself in Matthew 28:18-20 commissioned his disciples to go, teach and baptize people in the name of the Father, Son and Spirit. This is what we aim to do in multiplication. More than just speak the gospel or get people into the pews, we recognize that the call of discipleship is one of life-long ambassadorship of Christ: hearing, believing, exemplifying, proclaiming and serving as we follow Jesus’ example.
It is our hope to grow continuously in the grace of the gospel so that we increasingly live out every facet of our lives with the purpose of making God known and enjoyed. Multiplication, then, isn’t limited to mercy ministries or short term mission trips; we want to be making disciples that make disciples no matter what else we’re doing. Whether serving at church, helping those in need on the street, spending time with our families at home, filing papers at the office, chatting in the coffee shops we frequent or dining out at the restaurants where we spend our date nights; whether getting to know our neighbors five feet away or unreached peoples five thousand miles away, Jesus has saturated the totality of our lives with the purpose of gospel multiplication to the glory of God. (2 Corinthians 5:18-20, Matthew 28:18-20; Acts 1:8).