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| The Gospel Changes Everything (Our
Central Value from which the others flow) |
| The Gospel is God's explosive power that changes everything. (Rom. 1:16)
We minister with great hope and confidence
We preach the gospel to believers, not just unbelievers
We motivate with grace not guilt
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| The Gospel Changes Lives |
- Religion makes nice people; the Gospel makes new people. Religion reforms you on the outside; the Gospel transforms you from inside out
- Religion says: "If you live a good life, then God will love you", leading to a deadly combination of pride and despair. The Gospel says, "None of us is good. In fact, we are far worse than we think (humility), but through Jesus Christ we are far more loved than we ever dared dream (confidence)"
- Because we are "in Christ", we are given a new identity, a new Father, and a new family
- Because "Christ is in us", we have new wisdom, new love, and new power, new motivation, new worldview
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| The Gospel Makes Us Outward Faced |
- Jesus makes a people for others such that non-Christians are expected, welcomed, and respected, with all their questions, objections, struggles, and doubts
- The gospel enables us to overcome our apathy (because of gospel joy), our pride (because of gospel grace), and our fear (because of gospel love).
- We are friendship oriented, not combative. We take a process approach, not a crisis approach
- We realize that unbelievers will be "looking on and listening in" wherever we are as a body or as individuals. There are no "in house" moments
- In daily life, we embrace the call to simply love our neighbors. In worship services, we are determinedly conscious of and welcoming to non-Christians in our midst, seeking for comprehensibility at all times
- Bottom Line: The gospel makes us a community where Christians say, "This is the place to bring my non-Christian friends. This is what they need to hear, and how they need to hear it"
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| The Gospel Creates a New Community |
- The body of Christ, a living sacrifice, a temple of living stones, a holy nation, the family of God. These New Testament descriptions tell us that they understood themselves primarily as a community, rather than as individuals
- Jesus came to create a new community, empowered by the Gospel
- In Community, we preach the gospel to one another
- In Community, we devote ourselves to one another with increasing vulnerability, because the gospel frees us from hiding our faults. We are finally free to struggle
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| The Gospel Energizes a Movement Mentality
- The gospel is dynamic, always spreading, always reaching out
- The gospel gives us confidence to believe that God is always at work, and will not be thwarted in his advance of the Kingdom of God.
- The gospel gives us compassion to see neighborhoods, and other cities reached with the unique message of the gospel, in a context that embodies the core values of our church
- New Churches are needed, are more effective in evangelism, and serve to mobilize more believers for ministry
- Because the church is the primary agent of God's kingdom, planting churches is a high priority. By proliferating churches centered on the gospel, we can play a significant role in mending the world and testifying to our hope of Jesus' return when he will set all things right
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The Gospel Renews Socially |
- The gospel is the gospel "Of the Kingdom of God", therefore without a concern for the poor and for justice issues, we are not a gospel driven church, because it is the gospel of the Kingdom
- We are called to embody the gospel as we seek to give foretastes of the Kingdom by seeking the healing of the world's woundedness
- We seek to create an environment for the gospel to be understood, but we must create an environment where people are discovering the joy of "living out their gospel commitments". We are both "telling" and "showing". The gospel is the gospel of the Kingdom
- Our church is a model of the Kingdom of God, and an agent of the Kingdom of God. We model its priorities, and we seek to do its priorities, and aid others in doing the priorities of the Kingdom
- We don't involve ourselves in evangelism simply for the impact it will have on non-Christians. It is NOT that evangelism flows out of social concern, nor that social concern is good for our evangelistic purposes...rather, evangelism IS social concern IS evangelism, and cannot be defined apart from it if we define the purposes of God in a gospel driven and holistic manner
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