MISSION, VALUES, + BELIEFS

We believe that the gifts of the Holy Spirit, as outlined by Paul in 1 Corinthians 12, have not ceased and are to be used with joy, wisdom and discernment in the life of the local church. We believe the gifts are given by God for the strengthening of His church and the building up of all believers.

We believe the Bible is God’s entirely trustworthy, inspired, and authoritative Word to His people, and we take seriously its numerous commands to read, memorize, discuss, teach, and obey it. Of course, doing this well means engaging the text prayerfully and carefully. We believe that God’s inspiration worked through human authors whose character and context profoundly shaped the Scriptures we read today. Therefore, we labor to link the living Word of the ancient text to the dynamic circumstances of our daily lives. Ultimately, this means following all of Scripture’s prose and poetry as it flows like rainfall toward a single, infinitely deep well of living water: Jesus Christ.

Across the Grace family of churches, we affirm the Biblical design of marriage from the beginning as being a covenant between one man and one woman, and that sexual intimacy is reserved for the marriage relationship.

At the same time, we face very real and very complex ministry contexts in which we are learning how best to share the Good News of Jesus with every person, regardless of sexual orientation. All people live in our beautiful but broken world, and all people long to discover love and relationship and wholeness.

We unapologetically believe that Jesus is the way (and the truth, and the life) toward that wholeness, and so our primary focus is meeting Christ so that he can be the one to speak into and heal the wounds that are common to human experience.

For us, a fundamental truth of the Bible is that spiritual gifts are not gender-specific. In other words, we believe that the Holy Spirit releases gifts of leadership to both men and women. Our challenge, then, is to disciple and empower both men and women in the areas of their gifting within local contexts for maximum impact for the Kingdom of God. Practically, this means each church in the Grace Family values the God-given capacity of women to lead without limitation even as we humbly evaluate the best empowerment of that leadership in each local situation.

We believe that all of humanity is created in the image of God, therefore we are passionately committed to racial equity. We want to live out Jesus’ Kingdom dream of unity for the church, through continued learning, by standing against the sin that leads to racism, by embracing diversity through the love of God, and creating a church that is safe for all People of Color.

We see our world’s profound need for healing and are committed to laboring toward a redeemed community bound together by the love of Christ and representing every nation, ethnicity, race and language (Rev. 7:9). We recognize we cannot accomplish Jesus’ command to “make disciples of all nations” without multi-ethnic discipleship and real cross-cultural friendships. We are compelled by the love of Christ to fight injustice wherever we find it as we serve and speak out on behalf of the poor, oppressed, vulnerable, and forgotten (Luke 4:18-19, Prov. 31:8-9, Is. 58:1-12).

Ever since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, we have felt a very strong call as a church family to prioritize relationships with Muslim communities precisely because many people–especially Christians–do not. Rather than “interfaith dialogue,” we hope to build multi-faith relationships with Muslim communities in which we acknowledge the very real differences between our faith traditions even as we continue in friendship. We hope to see our friends in the Muslim community come to follow Jesus, and we pray for the day when God’s Spirit will heal the current division and antipathy between our faith traditions. Toward that end, we are committed to learning and appreciating the truth many of our Muslim friends already possess even as we seek to discover more truth together. Our weekend intensive Jesus and the Qur’an is offered several times each year across the Grace Family and explores these subjects in much more detail.