Discovering Your Calling:

We believe that God creates, sustains, redeems, guides, and equips each of us.  The One who has called us into being continually calls us in life. We are summoned by God’s Spirit to live our lives in God and for God.  We believe that one of the main tasks of faith is to tune ourselves to the mysterious divine calling that directs our lives.

Pursuing Your Passion:

Much of God’s work in our lives remains a mystery, but we believe that God’s calling often has something to do with those things we are deeply passionate about, those unique interests, abilities, gifts, personality traits, and longings that stir our soul.  Some of those passions and characteristics may seem clearly religious, sacred, or spiritual.  Others may not readily be seen as religious, but we believe that our Creator desires to bless and use our entire lives and not just pieces of our lives we deem “religious.”  We may even find that many of the passions we identify as sinful and destructive are simply God-given passions that have been perverted or misdirected.  Since we tend to invest our time in those things that excite us or that we believe are priorities, much of what God calls us to do might be right in front of our eyes, and many of the resources God calls us to use may already be in hand.

Engaging God’s Mission :

Our God-directed calling with our God-given passions are given a God-size purpose.  That purpose, generally speaking, is described in 2 Corinthians 5:18-20:

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.  So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

God’s mission in Christ is a mission of reconciliation with a worldwide scope.  God’s reconciling work has been ongoing since the beginning of time, but it culminated when God became human in the person of Jesus of Nazareth (the Christ).  Fully human, Jesus Christ lived, taught, ministered, and died some two thousand plus years ago.  But we believe that Jesus was raised from the dead and continues to live with us in Spirit.  Through the life, teachings, earthly ministry, death, resurrection and ongoing presence of Christ, God is continually working to “reconcile” the world.  Christ’s mission of reconciliation is to bring a broken world back to God.

This obviously includes Christ’s forgiveness, healing, and transformation of individuals—and therefore a desire to have a personal relationship with those individuals—but it also includes God’s ongoing work to make right all that is wrong in the world.  As Jesus taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).

Jesus doesn’t just save us from our sins, Jesus saves us for his mission, joining him as his disciples and his ambassadors in the all-encompassing work of reconciliation.  We don’t only call Jesus, “Savior,” we also call him “Lord.”