Christ Our Redeemer
Our COR Values
Community: “Life on a small boat together.” Jesus calls us to ‘do life in community’. Because we are made in the image of the Triune God, we only become whole persons through relationship. We experience God in community, we grow up into the image of Christ through authentic relationship and we serve the world around us from community into community. We will always be learning how to be a community and always be calling people deeper into the many different expressions of it in the life of our church.
Discipleship: “We intend to actually teach people how to fish for themselves!” Word ministries are crucial in our church, but information alone does not transform people. We want to school the heart and not just the head, to be practitioners of the Word, not just pupils. The greatest challenge of Jesus is to internalize his teachings, not just listen to them. We will set out to actually obey the Great Commission and become a disciple-making community.
Spirituality: “Jesus loved being around those fishermen … all day long!” The grace of God makes us whole persons whose spirituality is integrated into the ordinary soil of our everyday lives. We are not dualists whose spirituality is confined to a few religious practices a couple of times a week. The doctrine of creation means God finds delight in every inch and every moment of my being and redemption means that my spirituality is grounded in the finished work of Christ, not my works.
Missional: “It’s easy to fall in love with fishing tackle but a church without a mission is not a church.” Just as Jesus was sent into the world, so each one of us is sent into the world (Jn. 20:21). Every one of us is ‘called’ to give our lives away for others. To be missional means that we will not be culture-bashers, but seek to understand and enter our culture in order to reach it with the Gospel. It means we embrace Spirit-led creativity for the sake of the Kingdom. Missional ecclesiology calls for a servant-leadership that is not competitive, but cooperative with other Kingdom partners.
Incarnational Approach: “People ‘go’ fishing; they don’t wait for the fish to come to them.” Jesus’ Great Commission was not: “Build it, and they will come.” (the Invitational Approach). We want to move the ministry of the gospel out of the ‘sanctuary’ and into the streets and into our living rooms and kitchens. We want to move ministry out of the hands of a professionalized clergy and into the hands of the laity; out of church buildings and into school buildings, into office buildings and into all the other marketplaces of life. We believe that the best pulpit for preaching the gospel is our daily lives.
Truth: “The only ‘bait’ we’ll use is truth spoken in love.” Jesus came to set us free with the truth(Jn. 8:32). He is the truth, the word made flesh. We are convinced that truth imbedded in relationship is the path that liberates people to be free, whole and blessed. We believe that heresy is ultimately cruel to people; untruth wrecks havoc in people’s lives. We want to avoid the path of truth without love, because then we become hard, but we also want to avoid the path of love without truth because then we become soft.
