1. Welcoming & Inclusion

In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Quite an expansive statement of inclusion from Paul of the Bible, a once-upon-a-time super duper excluder, which we operationalize thus:

We place no restrictions on church participation at any level based on race, national origin, sex, class, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

Before meeting Christ, Paul knew that only people with the right religious and ethnic identity, who also obeyed the rules, could join the community of faith. Letting the wrong people in would taint everyone, displease God, and make a mess of the whole religious endeavor. After meeting Jesus, however, Paul sang a different tune: Wow, he now proclaimed, God welcomes anyone! EVERYONE! Identity and obedience matter not at all.

Paul had realized that Jesus had destroyed all spiritual obstacles standing between us and God, and then also neutralized anything of human culture or identity that could be used to exclude—autonomy, ethnicity, money, religiousness, gender—the list goes on.

“Come to me,” says Jesus, “all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Not many qualifiers there. We can all freely access the goodness of God who joyfully unites the full spectrum of our diversity through the person of Jesus into a brilliant faith community that shines its light into the world.

2. Reality

One night my son came down into the kitchen, turned on the light, and caught me. It was 11:30, and I was alone. With ice cream.

“Do you do this often, Dad?” he asked me.

I licked my spoon. “Do what?”

We all have things we like to hide. Embarrassing behaviors and unsightly blemishes–we recoil from our own brokenness, just as we expect others to. Shame, our primal negative emotion, lurks in the dark shadows of our souls, waiting to pounce on us when we are the least bit exposed. And the urge to hide, to act, to “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet,”(1) seems to intensify as we approach God. Adam and Eve hid. And Peter, when he really understood who Jesus was, said, “Go away from me Lord! I am an unclean man.” The pressure in all of life, but especially in the church, is to pretend–to pretend that we’re better, happier, healthier–that we are someone other than who we really are.

But Jesus did not come for Someone Other. He came for You–the Real You (the one who needs help). When scorned by religious leaders for the disreputable company he kept, Jesus said, “It’s not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” Pretense shuts him out, but truth is beautiful, a superhighway for him straight to your heart. He exists 100% in reality, and in reality there is no shame. In reality there is brokenness, sin, blemishes, and ice cream. And in reality there is hope, healing, friendship, and a scoop for my son.

The Apostle John wrote, “If we walk in the light, as God is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, God's Son, purifies us from all sin.” We hope you find this a place of light, where we are truthful about who we are, and where you can feel free to be the same.

1 T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

3. Community

Good! Good! Good! Good! Good! Good! Very Good!!!

Six Goods and a Very Good—not bad for your first week on the job. Of course, God was performing a self-assessment, and even though this was the first ever universe (that we know of), God was, after all, God. So everything is perfect—light and dark; water and land; trees, birds, animals, fish; a garden and a human. But then, just as the universe starts to relax and enjoy itself a little, comes an impossible statement provoking a cosmic shudder, shaking creation to its core:

“The LORD God said: ‘It is not good [think Jim Lovell--Houston, we have a problem] for the human to be alone. ‘”

Well, I think, that’s obvious—how could God have missed it? None of us does well truly alone. And Adam had it extra rough—be fruitful and multiply (alone?), subdue the animals, tend the garden, work it and take care of it, all without modern farming implements. Of course he needed help!

But God was maybe on to something deeper. God's very own self derives deep joy and pleasure from community: the triune God, Jesus, and Holy Spirit—three distinct identities perfected in their unity and harmony with each other. So from the original human, God creates two novel humans so that as they come together they might experience a micro-cosmic version of divine community.

The church expands that community out into our world. Jesus, before leaving earth, prayed that his followers would be one just as he and God were one. He knew that unity more than anything else—more than power, goodness, or cash—would convince the world that the church was divine and not just another human social institution. And God knew that we’d each really struggle to live a life that we'd call good on our own.

We are therefore committed to pursuing God together in community. We provide as many structures and contexts as we can to foster real relational connections—Bible studies, cooking groups, family groups, book groups, thought groups—and we’ll use any excuse to throw a party, have a picnic, or just hang out longer together after church. We talk, laugh, cry, grieve, celebrate, repent, forgive, and in growing to love each other, we inhabit something that is Very Good.

4. Spirit

If God is a rock, God's Spirit is the wind. If God is immovable, God's Spirit is irresistible. If God is predictable and ordered, so that God's invisible qualities can be clearly seen and understood from what God has made, God's Spirit is inherently unconstrained and infinitely unpredictable. And if God, for whom a thousand years seems only a day, is slow to move, God's Spirit is quick and burns with passion.

God’s Spirit is fire, wind, and rain. The Spirit is a dove descending from heaven. Yet the Spirit is also a person, one of the three persons of God, distinct from but unified with God the Father and Jesus the Son. God's Spirit is that person of God whom Jesus, when he returned to heaven, sent to be with us so that we would not be alone as we carry on Jesus' mission and await the consummation of all things. The Spirit communicates God’s deepest thoughts and releases God’s limitless power to us here and now. The Spirit is a Teacher, a Counselor, a Friend, and a Protector.

We believe that God’s Holy Spirit is alive today and interacts with us in tangible ways. It is the Presence of this Spirit that distinguishes us, that fills us with life, and that takes our ideas, values, and philosophies and makes them something transcendent. We believe that God's Spirit can inform our thinking, giving us divine insight into ourselves and the world around us.

We believe that God's Spirit can illuminate the Bible, making it relevant to ourselves and the world around us. And we believe that the Spirit can touch and heal our physical infirmities and our broken hearts, and that the Spirit can speak to us to encourage us and direct our lives. It is, ultimately, the presence of the Spirit that distinguishes the church from all other people on the face of the earth.

5. Relevance

Dylan sang, “The times, they are a’ changin. ‘” David Byrne, riding the same wave, said, “You may ask yourself, 'How did I get here?‘” We all surf it, the wave of cultural change, rushing ahead faster and faster, its pace and intensity surging with each generation, threatening to wash us out and leave us behind. In the blink of an eye, or of a decade, the prevailing sensibilities, values and vocabulary can so diverge that those looking forward at the ones looking back (and vice versa) become unrecognizable to each other. And so each generation must revisit the puzzle: Who am I? How did I get here? Where do I start?

Isaiah, anticipating Dylan and David, wrote, “The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever.” God is the only thing in this perpetual motion machine of a universe that never changes. God is a touchstone and a starting place. In permanence, immutability, steadfastness, and infinity, God is eternally relevant. The truth of God always applies to every sensibility, value, and vocabulary.

The challenge, then, is to have the church speak to its world around it using the indigenous dialect, with language, music, symbols, and ideas that are current and understandable. Fortunately, while long ago the best efforts of men produced only Babel, God is a master of lucidity and translation. When God rained down the Holy Spirit on that group of disciples worshiping and praying, what caught everyone’s attention, more than the wind and fire, was relevance:

A crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them (the disciples) speaking in his own language. Utterly amazed, they (the people) asked: Are not all these men who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native language?

God wants to speak to you in your native language. God knows the words, symbols, music, and ideas that you will understand. Jesus, in all his interactions, related to people as individuals, avoiding stereotypes, generalizations, and formulas. We want this church to reflect that value, to communicate God’s timeless message of love with a relevance rooted firmly in the here and now.