Here are some passions that we cultivate together as a Christ-centered community:

We believe that God intends Christianity to be a way of life that sends us into the world to serve God and our neighbors, so that His will may be done on earth as it is in heaven. In obedience to God, we want to join what He is doing to care for our friends and neighbors who are hurting, marginalized, and suffering injustice locally and globally. We believe in the Kingdom of God—the alternative vision for the world taught by Jesus in which the last come first and the weak are made strong—and that we have a part to play in it.

We believe that even through small acts of compassion for the poor, God’s Kingdom is increased in real ways. This is why many of us have spent Saturday afternoons as a community sharing lunch and conversation with a few of our homeless neighbors in D.C. and building friendships with them.

We want to follow God in real life in College Park and the surrounding community, whatever that may look like. We don’t want to just talk about social action; we want to do something. Despite our apparent smallness in the face of suffering and injustice, we aren’t giving up, but are just getting started, empowered by the vast love of Christ and the strength of the Holy Spirit.

We are also excited about becoming part of an ever-widening circle of friends following Jesus. We want to follow the path of the first small group of regular people who heard Jesus calling, got up, and went with Him. They were blessed and sent to carry on in His way of living and to welcome others to do the same. Like them, we want our Christian community to be an attraction to outsiders and a living answer to questions of faith.

We are excited to move with what God’s Spirit is doing in the world today. We are passionate about seeing those who are not yet involved in church become an active part of it. We want to speak the truth in love, and in the love of Christ, and we seek to be flexible about traditional ideas of “church” in order to bring the gospel into our present era.

Ultimately, we are passionate about bringing people healing and hope in Jesus, not just storing these gifts up for ourselves. As part of the global body of Christ, we believe that doing our part to redeem the world with the truth and love is central to why we’re here.

Since humans are spiritual creatures, everything we do forms us spiritually. As a Christian community, we want to be formed together by sharing the way of life of followers of Jesus that is abundant, rich, tough, and sacrificial. We want to pursue God together and learn to live life with Him. We seek to receive the truth in and from Jesus through all the ways that He gives us, including the Bible, fellow members of the body of Christ, God’s creation, and the Holy Spirit.

The scriptures root and guide our walk of faith and bear witness to the word of God who is Jesus Christ. We seek to drink deeply from the well of scripture—the story of salvation and written testimony to Jesus Christ passed on to us by our ancestors in the faith. We want to tell the Biblical story and contribute to God’s story as it continues in the present.

We are also passionate about praying, listening to God, and obeying Him together. We want to turn to Him not only within our small community but also together with the global Church that we serve and depend on as the larger family of God. We want to participate together in the “spiritual disciplines”—habits that turn us toward God—that have been practiced since the beginning of Christianity. We want to practice economy and be good managers of God’s creation and His gifts to us, and we want to participate in God’s creating, redeeming, and sustaining dream for the world.

We want to speak words of wisdom and knowledge to each other within loving, accountable relationships, since it is in these contexts that discipleship—training in the way of Jesus—happens best. This is why some of us have been meeting in an accountability and confession group to experience God’s forgiveness and pursue a path of righteousness together. We have also seen discipleship and spiritual growth happen through the participation of our whole group in decision-making and the leadership of the church.

We want to be a place where people can intellectually explore theology and the implications of Christian spirituality. In addition to having these discussions during Sunday gatherings, our small group happens to include several philosophically minded folks who have hosted online discussions and book studies that have attracted people from the wider community.

Finally, we want to become closer to Jesus not just through words but also through Christ-like actions, by fighting against injustice together through acts of service and mercy.

Community is basic to our survival as people and to our mission for Jesus. We want to share life with one another and with our neighbors in such a way that we become a living, local expression of the global, historical body of Christ. We believe that the church is not a “thing” that does things; we are the church, and we build the church as we support one another in love as Jesus expresses Himself through us. As we share and foster community life in our neighborhood, we share in the loving, communal life of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. His love—for us, in us, and through us—unites our church community as we offer ourselves as members of the body of Christ.

Christian life is by necessity a communal one; we have found that Christian community helps followers of Jesus to pursue God with passion and diligence. And it gives us the support to actually do something about our dreams for God’s Kingdom—dreams of being part of a force for hope, mercy, justice, and healing in our neighborhood. In fact, a few of us have been discussing moving to live closer together to start some form of intentional community for this reason.

Because God welcomes us home as His “prodigal sons,” and because Jesus was a stranger in our world, welcoming the “stranger” with hospitality is at the heart of being a Christian. We want to always reach across barriers—across racial/ethnic, class, and cultural divides—since a gospel or “good news” that doesn’t reconcile is no gospel at all. We want to seek justice and healing for the divisions that afflict our culture, not just peace or coexistence. We want to be open to people with different theological and ecclesiological beliefs and preferences. We are blessed that College Park is a richly diverse community, and we honor God’s welcome to all people, regardless of culture, ethnicity, economic situation, or social position. Our hope is that our church community can be a place where different cultures can come in contact with one another and be a blessing to each other.

Of course, we’re flawed people, so caring for each other, sharing our time and gifts and ideas, and working together are not always easy. But forgiveness is at the heart of God’s love for us, and it must be central to our love for each other.

Because beauty, art, and creativity come from God, we want to foster creativity and value artistic expression so that we reflect the image of the Creator. By being creative, we seek to shape ourselves in Christ’s likeness, to share joy, beauty, and wisdom with each other, and to bring glory to God.

We want to honestly express our faith and our relationship to it, as the psalmists did, using a full range of emotion and in light of the full range of the human condition. We also want to creatively imagine God’s future emerging in the present. And we want to help people use their unique gifts to do these things, whether their talents are in writing, speaking, art, poetry, dance, music, or anything else.

We also want to use our creativity for the worship of God. He is the creator and victorious redeemer whom we love, and so He is worth celebrating and glorifying. We want to offer collective and individual ways to respond to God’s love with gratitude, and we want to make the reality of God, as good, holy, and eternal, more apparent to those around us through creative, vibrant, authentic worship.