The Church was founded in VISION. We asked ourselves: what if we could build a Church from the ground up, what kind of Church would we want to be part of? This was the original, 8-point Vision for Christ Our Redeemer has continued to drive us and has been re-articulated and summarized into formats that that can be more easily communicated. G4 is our briefest version:
Grace is our glorious foundation
Grow! is our constant exhortation
Groups are our primary organization
Go! is our radical orientation
When you open the lens of VISION a bit wider, we boil it down to these six CORe Values that drive our Vision. Because Jesus calls us to become fishers of men, we could say:
Community
Community is learning how to love one another in a small boat together! If we’re going to work this closely with each other, we’re going to have to put the gospel to work in our lives daily.
Discipleship
We intend to actually teach people how to fish for themselves instead of snacking on fish that other people have caught for them!
Spirituality
Our life in Christ is not a time slot on Sundays. Spirituality is the life of the Spirit of Jesus Christ with us all day and all week long no matter what we’re doing.
Missional
A church without a mission is not the Church of Jesus. We want to place in our lives the mission which is at the center of Jesus’ life. (Fishing boats that remain tied up at the dock are useless.)
Incarnational
Incarnation means we make the Word of God become flesh out in the marketplaces of life.
People go fishing, they don’t wait for the fish to come to them. Go! is the first word in the Great Commission that Jesus gave us.
Truth
HOSPITALITY “Here, come sit beside me in the boat; I’ll make room for you. I was once a stranger myself and new to the crew and someone gave up their seat for me.” We will be a church characterized by hospitality. Hospitality is turn-around grace. When God’s grace comes to us, we turn around and offer it to others; we will be a stream, not a pond. “Pursue hospitality”, Paul commands us (Rom. 12:13), and so we are to invite visitors home with us, engage enquirers over coffee, look for the lost and seek out the stranger. All these will find an extra chair readily pulled up to our table.