The good news about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is not simply a message to receive when coming into the faith, but is the core reality that shapes how we lead, how we serve, how we speak, and how we grow as followers of Jesus within community and on His mission.

The story of God, as told in the Bible, reveals the missional record of who God is and what God is doing in, through, and for the world. It is the true story of the whole world. Discipleship is participating in that story and allowing it to shape your entire life.

When making disciples through community and while on mission, we root disciples first in their new identity in Christ. We believe knowing who you are leads to how you live. If we reverse this, we’ve created legalism apart from the powerful gift of grace to make us new.

We pursue a reliance on the power, wisdom, and presence of the Holy Spirit for all we do. We don’t look to models, gifts, or tools to transform lives, but look to the work of the Spirit operating in us and through us in everything we do.

We believe the context for disciples to be made, to grow into maturity, and sent out on mission is within community. We structure and support our churches around the discipleship principle that we are on God’s mission and we are God’s mission. Similarly, the community of disciples is the context in which people who don’t know Jesus encounter the love of Jesus.

While the biblical model for making disciples is through community, the model for leadership is also through plurality. We believe every layer of discipleship within our churches requires diversity of gifts, stories, and personalities to lead. Our churches and missional communities are led through leadership teams serving Jesus in unity.

The mission of God is local and global. It’s across our streets and down the street; but it’s also across town, across our countries, and across the world. We look beyond our place and work toward the multiplication of communities and churches as outposts of the kingdom beyond our place.

As we plant new churches and communities, we believe the gospel, identity statements, and practices of the church must be internalized and contextualized to the people, language, idols, and circumstances of those new places. This list, in fact, provides the guiding principles in which leaders play, experiment, and develop new practices.

We don’t believe we’ve arrived. In fact, the process of discipleship is growing in repentance and belief as we follow Jesus. We humbly walk in repentance as a way of life that leads to changes in how we behave, how we lead, and how we speak.

We pursue partnerships, connections, and genuinely shared ministry with other churches, organizations, and nonprofits. We choose the kingdom over logos.