Being rooted in the Gospel Jesus preached

The message of Jesus was not simply how to get your sins forgiven and get into heaven, as powerful as these realities are and will be.  According to the Gospel writers, Jesus’ primary message was that the Kingdom of God is near.  This is the same thing he told the disciples to proclaim when they entered a village.  God has brought near all that we need to really live this life really well, and there is a bigger and better reality/story to live for.  God is not just inviting us to come into heaven later on, He is inviting us to help Him bring the Kingdom of Heaven into the world here and now.  With God dwelling within us, there is a radical new life available—forgiveness kicks the door to this new life open, and heaven is where it eventually leads us, but between here and there we are invited to live in the Jesus Way.

Being missional, but missional out of encounter with the living God

There’s a lot of talk about being missional today, but to live missionally for Jesus and his Kingdom is to live missionally from the same place Jesus did.  This means that real missional living in the world comes out of hearts being transformed by encounter with the living God, and out of an ongoing journey of discipleship in our lives.  Another way to say this is that being missional is not just doing good things in the world; rather, it is people who have received the God of the Kingdom in their own hearts and lives taking the Kingdom of God everywhere they go.  To this end, we highly value the experience of the presence of God in worship and prayer, simply because for those who have known God's presence, Christianity moves beyond being mere doctrines and ideology.

Shaping well rounded Jesus communities

Churches often chase one thing to the neglect of others.  If the church is about one thing, that one thing is the Kingdom of God, or to put it another way, God’s restoration of everyone and everything.  Within that one thing fall several connected priorities: Discipleship, Community, Worship, and Mission.  To live out the Kingdom as a community of Jesus is to pay attention to all of these, which means that we are cultivating circles of strong relationship within the community, helping people know God and grow in their journey of following Jesus, helping people worship and encounter the living God, helping and blessing those outside the church in tangible ways, and being witnesses of Jesus Christ.  The whole package matters, and we want to be whole package churches.

Intense pursuit of discipleship

The journey of the Christian is to live from and for the Kingdom of God in this world, but the five-fold Christian leaders have additionally been given the job of making disciples.  This must be our primary task.  To make disciples is to help people become followers of Jesus, which is to see God reshaping them into new men and women who see differently, think differently, and live differently as a result of their personal connection with God and their embracing of the teaching of Jesus.  It is not enough to attract people and get them coming to worship gatherings; our success is not defined by measuring crowds, but by measuring disciples.

Transformation trumps Legalism

Jesus came to make new men and women out of us from the inside out.  As he said, "First clean the inside of the cup and dish and then the outside also will be clean" (Matthew 23:26).  So while we hold to our best understanding of goodness and morality, our ministry focus is on helping people come to God and their own hearts in a way that changes who they are on the inside.  In order to keep this emphasis at the center, and in order to remove unnecessary barriers for those who don't know the Lord, we shy away from any kind of legalism.

Churches created for mission, not merely fellowship

Churches that are birthed around the invitation to come find Christian friends and a sense of belonging rarely move beyond Christian fellowship to the mission of God.  But churches that begin as a community with a clear mission discover that the people on the mission do find fellowship and connection with one another, in fact often to a greater degree than groups just focused on fellowship.  Churches planted in our network must, from the very beginning, have a clear mission they are pursuing and inviting others to.

The adventure of being engaged locally

Jesus went out into the villages.  Likewise, we are to live the good things of the Kingdom in our own communities and the communities near us.  There are a million ways to do this, so each church should ask the Lord to lead them—how would He have us love, bless, and help people outside our church’s walls?  The question we continually ask is this: If our church disappeared tomorrow, would it bother anyone other than those who belong to it?  If not, we are isolated, and need to learn to follow Jesus into the villages.  One of our churches has a significant outreach to marginalized teens and twenty-something in their community.  Another feeds the poor and teaches English to Hispanic immigrants.  But even more than these corporate outreaches, we must create Jesus communities where the individual people partner with God by living incarnationally with the people in their everyday spheres of life.

The adventure of being engaged globally

Jesus said to go to the nations.  The world has become a smaller place, making this an even easier thing for a church to live out.  Our experience has taught us that a church which gives itself for the nations receives just as much as it gives from that process.  Every church in our network must pick a place in the world to be committed to missionally by the time they begin public worship gatherings.  One of the serendipitous benefits of this is that many non-Christians or people with a vague faith in the U.S. are eager to make a difference in the larger world, but don’t have a personal way to do it.  What an amazing thing for a new church to be able to say to people, “We are touching people in __________ (nation), would you like to help us?”  In this, we are inviting people to draw near to seeing the Kingdom of God at work.

Birthing sustainable communities

Good churches come in all shapes, sizes, and flavors.  This is how it should be, since each of us who lead churches has the responsibility to contextualize our ministry to those we seek to reach and to our own wiring as leaders.  So we are not at all hung up on one size or model of church.  But as we shape these new churches, it matters whether they are sustainable.  For example, we have seen church planters who said they wanted a small, tight church, and really didn’t care if it grew bigger very fast.  But then, a couple years into it, when the church could not support them financially, they closed it and moved on.  Every church does not have to be big enough to pay a full time pastor, and some pastors may not want to completely leave their other paying vocations, but the planter must be committed to the idea that God wants to create Jesus communities that last for a good amount of time.  As a network, we are not interested in planting churches that will only be around for a couple of years, because in our culture it often takes longer than that just to help individual people become disciples of Jesus.