So, here are the four main pillars governing our life together:
1. Discipleship - Growing in God, getting his DNA
2. Koinonea - God with skin on
3. Freedom - God's creativity unleashed
4. Dominion - God with shoes on
Discipleship - Growing in God, getting his DNA
Disciple making means showing people, over time, how to live life to the fullest. In doing so, we bring them into intimacy with the Father. The disciples said, "Show us the Father." Jesus replied, "You've seen me; you've seen the Father." He brought them into intimacy with the Father by modeling what that looked like. Similarly, we disciple others by being God's ambassadors. If you were to meet the Japanese ambassador, he might make a similar claim, "If you've seen me, you've seen Japan. I am the physical representation of Japan in America."
We don't naturally know how to walk as citizens of the Father's Kingdom anymore than the 12 disciples did. It took Jesus about three years of intensive modeling of life and ministry before they began to see God's big picture and walk in authority and faith.
Jesus was intentional in making disciples, selecting them one-by-one. So our churches need to be hotbeds of disciple-making, places where believers are encouraged and challenged. Successful disciple-making produces the fruit of intimacy with God. It encompasses the activities of worship and prayer, which are the way in which we live our lives before God, and our attitude toward the gifts of the Spirit, which are God's empowerment of His people to take dominion over His creation. As God empowers us, so He decentralizes power in His church, making us all priests, giving us all Kingdom DNA. As such, we become a threat to our sworn enemy, a threat that is realized as we begin to embrace the partnership with God that He desires.
Koinonea: God with skin on
Just as we were fashioned to find our true identity in God, so we were created as social creatures to interact with one another and in that interaction, find our context in a group of people whom we love and whom we are loved by. This inter-working is grounded in the Greek word, koinonea. It forms the basis for our understanding of what church should look like.
Some might call it "fellowship," but that word has connotations of potluck dinners in fellowship halls. It is insipid next to the red-blooded, full throttle corporate celebrations and nurturing body life that God designed us for. The deep peace and security that we experience in being known and accepted by a group, the celebrating which we do together and the grace we offer and experience, are all foundational aspects of Kingdom living.
True koinonea produces the fruit of intimacy within our fellowship. The profound commitment to one another that makes this dynamic possible is called "covenantal." This is a term that has fallen on hard times in our individualistic, mobile society. It is hard to commit when neither you nor others know with any certainty whether you'll be there in the next year. True covenantal relationships are based on shared responsibility and mutual accountability.
When we do find koinonea, we find a part of ourselves that we never knew was missing. We become complete as we fulfill our role in something much bigger than ourselves. We were born to be team players, not renegades, yet too many Christians have never found their team. When at last we find it, the dynamic we experience is koinonea.
Freedom: God's creativity unleashed
A little tyrant lives within us all that wants to find structure and comfort where the only certainty is mystery. We by nature seek to bring order out of chaos. As pioneers in any new world, whether it is physical or metaphysical, we want to cut down trees, plant gardens, and put up fences. Because this is the way we are hard-wired, we need the in-built brake on our proclivity that the doctrine of freedom brings. Theologians are inveterate fence-makers whose lives generally cannot support their vocation. As they erect spiritual fences for the rest of us, we assume they know what they are doing and live within the confines of their boundaries.
A consequence of this sad fact of life is that thousands of denominations speak definitively about things which are debatable. While God designed us for the freedom which an embrace of myth and mystery produce, we default to variations on the theme of legalism, a theme proven to be bankrupt in the Old Testament, and excoriated by Jesus in the New.
Embracing the freedom Jesus came to give us softens the edges of doctrinal positions which define the terms by which we engage with God and one another, terms which when reduced to paper and interpreted by men, inevitably become hard-edged and joyless. Understanding that this dynamic is what drains the vitality from all denominations over time, we need to allow God to be God
Ultimately, embracing a lifestyle of freedom, we live as children of the covenant and masters of creation, realizing that we were born to soar. Unfettered by lifestyle strictures mandated by theological curmudgeons, we find our wings and take flight.
Dominion: God with shoes on
Back in the garden, God gave Adam the keys to the Kingdom, dominion over all creation. Because Adam lost them, God's been trying to help the rest of us as Adam's heirs to recover our inheritance. God didn't set this up as some grand, failed experiment. After that initial setback, He put in motion a plan whereby we, His proxies and territorial stewards, would re-establish His Kingdom.
This enterprise was summarized by Jesus in His last words to his disciples - marching orders we know as the Great Commission: "Go and make disciples." But reconciling men to God and helping them discover their true royal identity and authority has always been God's plan.
Consequently, our posture towards the world projects the confidence of displaced heirs. The earth is the Lord's. He didn't create humanity for the misery and bondage that so many endure, but for a life of joy and abundance. Recognizing this, the original disciples moved out fearlessly into a hazardous and antagonistic world, a world that they turned upside down. As we recognize the mandate of exercising dominion that our royal identity confers, we raise the dead no less fearlessly than did Jesus' disciples.
As we take dominion over creation, we exercise the Great Commission authority Jesus conferred on us. We do so understanding God's kingly relationship to it both in a past-tense and future-tense perspective, church planting, which is the strategy by which we take dominion over small subsets of territory, and apostleship, which is the strategy by which we plant churches.
Practically, we exercise divine authority in every realm of the real world in which we live. Whether in our families, our workplaces, or our social and governmental institutions, we allow God to transform our culture through our interactions with it.
-Andrew Shearman, Seth Barnes
We believe all Scripture, both Old and New Testaments, form one covenant and was given by inspiration of God as the writers were moved by the Holy Spirit and that these Scriptures, under the teaching of the Holy Spirit, are the rule of faith and practice (2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Pet. 1:20-21).
We believe in the one true God who has revealed Himself as existing in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: distinguishable, but indivisible ( Mt. 28:19; Lk. 3: 21-22 ).
We believe the human race was originally created by God in His image to have dominion until sin entered by disobedience and rebellion and left humanity totally incapable of saving itself ( Rom. 5:12; Gen. 1:27 ).
We believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, very God and very Man ( Lk. 1:26-35; Jn. 1:1,14,18; Is. 7:14; 9:6 ).
We believe Christ our Savior died for our sins, was buried and rose again the third day according to the scriptures and appeared to His disciples ( 1 Cor. 15:1-8; Rom. 4:25 ).
We believe in the bodily ascension of Jesus Christ to heaven, His exaltation as Lord to the right hand of the Father, and His return in a state of glory for a glorious Church ( Jn. 14:2-3; 1 Thes. 4: 13-18 ).
We believe in the salvation of sinners by grace through repentance and faith in the perfect and sufficient work of Jesus Christ upon the cross by which we obtain the remission of sins through His shed blood ( Eph. 2:8-9; Heb. 9:12-14; Rom. 5:11 ).
We believe that water baptism is the obedient response to the command of the Lord ( Mt. 28:19; Acts 2:38; 19:1-6 ).
We believe in the baptism of the Holy Spirit, the promise of the Father for the empowering and maturing of the Christian with His accompanying gifts and fruits (Acts 2:1-4; 8:14-17; 10:44-46; Gal. 3:14).
We believe that the Church is the Body of Christ, the expression of the present rule and reign of the Kingdom of God on earth, and that Christ gave to the Church apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers for government and order and the preparing of disciples for works of service ( Eph. 4:11-13 ).
We believe in the resurrection of the dead, eternal judgment, and life everlasting ( Jn. 3:16; Jn. 5:24-27; Mk. 9:43-48; 2 Thes. 1:9; Rev. 20:11-15).
We believe in the present rule and reign of the Lord Jesus Christ in His Kingdom authority through His Body the Church. This will result in a glorious Church and a global harvest and that harvest will characterize the end of the age (Mt. 13:39; Acts 3:21).
We believe that the Church is in a process of restoration. God has called us both individually and corporately to repent, be converted, and receive refreshing from the presence of the Lord, for the purpose of “the restoration (reformation) of all things” (Acts 3:19-21; Heb. 6:1,2).
We are committed to allow the Holy Spirit to bring about reformation in the Church for the purpose of this restoration and the manifestation of God’s sons in the earth ( Rom. 8:19-21; 2 Cor. 3:17,18 ).