- Hospitality: Graceful Welcome is our Calling and Culture. We are a loved, loving family.
- Worship: Christian Liturgy confounds our cultural idols and fosters humble, formational worship.
Hospitality
Graceful Welcome is our Calling and Culture. We are a loved, loving family.
We are loved and welcomed in Christ, and we aspire to a culture of welcome and love. You do not have to be perfect, or righteous, or rich, or elite to be welcomed and loved in our community. We embrace grace, both in receiving and extending. We believe that saying yes to Jesus’ call means welcoming sinners and inviting all to hear the good news.
“Stepping into a church, unbelievers cannot judge if the Bible teaching is accurate, if the doctrinal statement is orthodox, or if the leadership structure is Biblical—but they feel right away if the church members love one another.”
Unknown
“Our Lord has many weak children in his family, many dull pupils in his school, many raw soldiers in his army, many lame sheep in his flock. Yet he bears with them all, and casts none away. Happy is that Christian who has learned to do likewise with his brethren.”
J. C. Ryle
“Do not for a moment suppose that you must make yourself better, or prepare your heart for a worthy reception of Christ, but come at once—come as you are.”
Archibald Alexander
“God strikes straight blows with crooked sticks.”
Gaelic Maxim
Story
The Good News of the Kingdom is our Cherished Story.
The Gospel is the true story of Christ the King coming to rescue his people from sin and separation from God by his atoning work on the cross and his resurrection from the dead. This is our story and our identity. Everything we are and do is anchored in the hope we have because of this story.
“The Gospel is not just a series of facts to which we yield our assent, but a dramatic narrative that re-plots our identity.”
Michael Horton
“Christianity met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story.”
G. K. Chesterton
“The Gospel is good news of mercy to the undeserving. The symbol of the religion of Jesus is the cross, not the scales.”
John R. W. Stott
“I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”
Alasdair MacIntyre
“The essence of other religions is advice. Christianity is essentially news.”
Tim Keller
“The single best way of conceiving of faith and the life of faith is as a story in which you are a character.”
Dan Taylor
Bible
The Bible is our Life-giving and Light-bringing Authority.
We are a Bible church. We accept the authority of Scripture as God’s Word. Too many view the Bible as a prison to bind, or a desert to wither and die in. We see the Word of God as a key and an oasis. This doesn’t mean submission to God’s commands in Scripture is easy, only that even the hard parts, the parts that confront our self-destructive sin, are for us a gift to be received.
“Run and work, the law demands. But gives me neither feet nor hands. A better song the Gospel sings, It bids me fly, and gives me wings.”
John Bunyan
“Mourning Christian, why are you weeping? Are you mourning over your own sins and failings? Look to your perfect Lord, and remember, you are complete in Him. You are in God’s sight as perfect as if you had never sinned; more than that, the Lord our Righteousness has clothed you with a royal robe of righteousness, which is wholly undeserved–you have the righteousness of God.”
C. H. Spurgeon
“Justification means that the only Person in the universe, whose opinion counts, absolutely delights in you.”
Tim Keller
Beauty
We embrace Beauty and Imagination. We are lovingly-created, loving creators.
We are not afraid of beauty. We believe in Redemption, but also in Creation. Meaning we believe that God is beautiful and that he created and creates beauty. We embrace beauty in our worship and in our lives. We embrace imagination as a capacity everyone is created with, a capacity that enables genuine, biblical faith to flourish. Christianity’s heritage is rich with Imagination and Beauty. We celebrate these as gifts of God for our joy and his glory.
“Let every fleeting loveliness I see speak to me of a loveliness that does not fade.”
John Baillie
“There is such a thing as glory and there are hints of it everywhere.”
Rich Mullins
“Art is love creating new worlds; justice is love rolling up its sleeves to heal the old one.”
N.T. Wright
“The Church needs artists because without art we cannot reach the world. The simple fact is that the imagination ‘gets you,’ even when your reason is completely against the idea of God. ‘Imagination communicates,’ as Arthur Danto says, ‘indefinable but inescapable truth.’ Those who read a book or listen to music expose themselves to that inescapable truth. There is a sort of schizophrenia that occurs if you are listening to Bach and you hear the glory of God and yet your mind says there is no God and there is no meaning. You are committed to believing nothing means anything and yet the music comes in and takes you over with your imagination. When you listen to great music, you can’t believe life is meaningless. Your heart knows what your mind is denying. We need Christian artists because we are never going to reach the world without great Christian art to go with great Christian talk.”
Tim Keller
“A Christian should use the arts to the glory of God, not just as tracts, mind you, but as things of beauty to the praise of God.”
Francis Schaeffer
“I am not of the opinion that all the arts shall be crushed to earth and perish through the gospel as some bigoted persons pretend, but would willingly see all and especially music, servants of Him who gave and created them.”
Martin Luther
Worship
Christian Liturgy confounds our cultural idols and fosters humble, formational worship.
Trends come and go (including TED Talk style sermons paired with cool concert music), but these innovations often fail to confront our cultural idols or shape us spiritually into citizens of heaven. Christian Liturgy is aimed at including us in worship (liturgy means “the work of the people”), welcoming us into the presence of God, and turns our attentions and affections toward God. Form matters. It forms us. Our heritage is rich and humbly receiving it, without being a prisoner to endless personalties or fads, is a relief and joy.
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
Gustav Mahler
“It’s very important to have your preferences accommodated in the worship service…if you’re the one being worshiped.”
Bill Haynes
“The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender’s inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual.” –
C. S. Lewis
“It looks as if [pastors] believed people can be lured to go to church by incessant brightenings, lightenings, lengthenings, abridgements, simplifications, and complications of the service…Novelty, simply as such, can have only an entertainment value. And they don’t go to church to be entertained. They go to use the service, or, if you prefer, to enact it. Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best—if you like, it ‘works’ best—when, through long familiarity, we don’t have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.”
C. S. Lewis
“It is of the new things that men tire—of fashions and proposals and improvements and change. But it is the old things that startle and intoxicate; it is the old things that are really young.”
G. K. Chesterton
“The Academy and the Church used to influence mass media, now mass media influences the Church, with disastrous consequences. It is one thing for the Court Jester to be at court, it is another thing when he rules the kingdom.”
Ken Myers