Our church’s priorities

Worship with Gravity and Gladness

As a church we want to approach the gathering of corporate worship with a proper balance of reverence and rejoicing. We don’t want to treat worship as a casual affair designed for entertainment. Instead, we want the Bible’s priorities and patterns to structure and shape not only who we worship but how we worship. So our worship service follows the rhythms of adoration, confession, assurance, preaching, communion, and the closing benediction. 

Check out this sermon to hear a fuller explanation of this priority of our church:

Center Everything Around the Gospel

Only one thing in the Scripture is given the label, “of first importance,” and that’s the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As a church we want the person and work of Christ to be the sun at the center of our church’s solar system that holds everything else in its proper gravitational orbit. We want to exalt Christ in such a way that He permeates and motivates everything we do.

Check out this sermon to hear a fuller explanation of this priority of our church:

Go as Christ’s Ambassadors

As a church we want Jesus’s last command to be our first priority: “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). As His ambassadors (2 Corinthians 5:20), we are sent to represent Christ and proclaim His gospel in word and deed. We seek to live out this calling by partnering with frontier missionaries who carry the good news to unreached peoples, by supporting local ministries that bring the gospel beyond our church walls, and by equipping one another to be faithful witnesses in every sphere of life where God has placed us.

Check out this sermon to hear a fuller explanation of this priority of our church:

Cultivate Community through Hospitality

As a church we want to reflect the reality that in Christ we are part of God’s forever family. It is our conviction that the health and growth of a church family is best cultivated through organic relationships rather than overly structured programming. And one of the best ways to develop relationships is by emphasizing and practicing hospitality and life-on-life interpersonal discipleship.

Check out this sermon to hear a fuller explanation of this priority of our church:

Bond Families and Generations Together

We want our church to be a place where there is not just peer to peer relationships but an intergenerational mingling. The body of Christ should be a place where the young are encouraged by the wisdom and experience of the elderly, and the elderly are encouraged by the liveliness and enthusiasm of the young. Also, we want the worship of the church to look like the family dinner table where every member of the family is seated together and feasting on the same meal.

Proclaim the Word with Depth for Doxology

Amidst all the shallowness, confusion, and distortion that we find in the world, we want our church to be a place where the truth of God’s Word is taught with clarity and depth, where we can ask and wrestle with difficult question, and where we can be equipped from all the Bible for all of life. As we are clear and uncompromising about the truth, we don’t want to be cold and lifeless in response to the truth. Instead, we want to proclaim the truth in such a way that it not only renews our minds but also ignites our affections and stirs our hearts in awe and wonder.

Check out this sermon to hear a fuller explanation of this priority of our church:

Lead by Shepherding and Serving

We believe that Christ, in His wisdom, has structured the oversight and governance of His church in such a way that there is to be a shared leadership of authority and responsibility among a group of qualified elders and deacons. This plurality principle is meant to protect the church from being built on a personality cult or ruled by a dictatorship. The office of elder is called to spiritual shepherd the church and the office of deacon is called to practically serve the church.

Check out this sermon to hear a fuller explanation of this priority of our church: