Love Jesus. Love Others.

A Ball of strings.

The absolute essence of our faith is that it is relational, connected, because that is the very nature of the triune God. Our experience of of God is wrapped up in our experience of each other.

We cannot fully experience God alone.

The networks of relationships, acquaintances, best friends, associates, families, colleagues, disciples, strangers, mentors, and Jesus knot together like a ball of strings. Tugging on one reveals its infinite connections. It is impossible to remove a single string. It is within this mess of tangled strings that we get to know God. It is in this chaos that we learn and grow.

Our relationships cannot be programmed or assigned, we leave them to grow and form spontaneously. So we try to create spaces for them to develop, good soil for them to grow in and a culture in which they are held in high regard.

After all we are all connected to God, connected to all those around us and to his creation. Being connected, we believe, is what it means to be truly human.

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Love Jesus

Jesus is the vision.

Jesus is the perfect revelation of the one God.

We love Jesus because he first loved us.

Jesus is the center of our trust. We do not try first to be like Jesus. Rather we try to die to ourselves so that he can live through us. Jesus is not only our example for living, he is also our means. We continually enter into death and into our brokenness so to be reborn with Jesus, to live our lives in, through and by him.

We want to be hidden in Christ. We want to be like children, to have the standing-in-awe mind of a child.

We want to allow the story of Scripture to become part of who we are, to influence us and to change us so we can know Jesus and fall deeper in love with God every day.

We live in a world drenched in God. He is everywhere. His divine image rests in every person. We are the ones that need to become aware of his ways and presence. God is a mystery to be engaged, not conquered.

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Love Others

When we love Jesus, his Spirit in us drives us toward others. We live towards these people in two movements that overlap and intersect.

One movement is towards other people, the church, that have also come to trust in Jesus and love him. We disciple one another in the love of Jesus and the love of others, we teach one another, encourage one another and simply do life together. We worship together, receive the Eucharist together, sing together and cry together. We share our lives, our meals and hold our resources with an open hand.

The other movement is towards those that do not yet know Jesus. As the body of Jesus we do not want to separate ourselves from the world and from culture. We want to be in the midst of it and built our dwellings in the world, as Jesus did.

We want to smell of the world.

We wrestle with what it means to be in the world but not of it. We want to live in the tension when heaven is brought to earth until Jesus returns.

We want to love and walk with people, especially those that have been rejected and are often hard to love. For us it takes a village to raise a child, but also to love people and introduce them to Jesus.

We want to be people that bring justice to the broken, poor and helpless through and with Jesus.

We live generous lives. We give because everything that we have is a gift. We give because God gives.

We hope that every person that walks with us will live within these 3 movements, towards Jesus, toward one another and towards the world.