Connection to Jesus
For Absolutely Anyone
This is Redemption’s mission. Our goal and purpose. Our prayer. For Sundays, groups, and all we do.
This is who we are.
We are a radically-inclusive, neighborhood-redefining, society-changing, Jesus-obsessed church. Because we think that’s just what Jesus intended.
We are a church that’s all about grace, love, and healing, especially in the nitty-gritty, messy, wounded, anxious world of everyday life. We lead with embrace. Because Jesus does too.
We’re convinced God is love, and we’re convinced Jesus is the embodiment of that love. He’s warm and affectionate and filled with joy. He is our true home. He’s left His home, stepping into this world of ours that He made, in order that He might eventually and permanently make His home with us. Heaven come to earth, healing in the flesh, glory in the everyday, God with us, relationship forever. Love! Yes, please.
So we’re building this church and our lives around knowing God and knowing each other—we’re building our church and our lives around connection. We worship together on Sundays with this goal in mind. We gather in homes throughout the week, wrestling with real issues, real conflicts, real doubts, real losses, real joys, real life, and in doing so we meet God and love each other. We serve our neighborhoods. We encourage and love our neighbors. And we do this week after week, over and over, believing we’re being formed by this grace, our sharing, our exploration, our faith.
We’ve been doing this since 2014, and God has been remarkably kind to us. We love each other. We love God more and more. And we repeatedly see glimpses of redemption. We’d love for you to join us.
Convictions
We have six core convictions: one foundation, two goals, and three tools. They explain all we hope to become. They inform everything we do.
1 Foundation
Jesus
Everything starts with Jesus. He’s not just any Jesus (there are lots of those), but He’s the eternal Son of God, who’s just like His Father in every way. He’s the ultimate revelation of God, the ultimate Word on who God is and what God is doing. He’s the One who created us in the first place, and He became like us in order to transform us. He stooped down to know us. He died for us, physically resurrected, and is coming back for us. This Jesus is the only hope of the world.
Everything comes down to being connected to Jesus, forgiven by Jesus, redeemed by Jesus, sharing with Jesus, and the exploration of Jesus that results in the encounter of Jesus. We want that for ourselves, for each other, and for absolutely everyone around us. Being united with Him puts us right with God, begins to transform us, and will ultimately lead to our resurrection when He renews all of creation.
Redemption worships Jesus, teaches Jesus, shares Jesus, follows Jesus, listens to Jesus, and works to build the kingdom of Jesus. He’s our savior, our redeemer, our Lord, our friend, our adviser, and our confidant. He’s our everything.
2 Goals
Connection
One of the major purposes and goals of Christian faith is connection to God and connection to each other.
Humans have an innate longing for something beyond themselves, for some sort of deep spirituality, some connection with the infinite, the transcendent, the beautiful, the divine. On some level we all sense that we were made to live in God's presence. So the goal of our church, like the goal of the Christian faith, is not to embrace lifeless intellectual propositions and not to ace some end-of-time pop quiz on religious facts and principles. Our goal is to know God and be known by Him. Our goal is to be so intimate with Him that He becomes our direct source of all that’s good and all we need.
This is the language of our mission statement: we want to be connected to Jesus. This will be our ultimate good. This connection is what we preach and what we pursue. It’s what we want for ourselves and all of our neighbors. Not just to know about God, but to know God. This is true and irrevocable life.
And when the Spirit of Jesus reconnects us to God, we find that we’re suddenly able to connect with each other in new and profound ways. Humans were designed in the first place to be relational beings, just like the three-in-one God is a relational being. We weren’t made to live life alone. And if our religion is working, if our faith is working, if our Jesus is working, we’re empowered to live joy-filled lives of love with each other. We’re empowered to be more human than we’ve ever been. We’re empowered to be connected to each other.
Redemption
One of the major purposes and goals of Christian faith is redemption, both of ourselves and also of the entire cosmos.
The gospel of Jesus provides free forgiveness from sin for all who trust Him. And the implications of this forgiveness are far more wide ranging than we may have previously understood. Forgiveness implies reconnection. And forgiveness implies redemption. Redemption is the state of all being made right, when shalom is the world’s norm, when justice is everywhere for everyone, when goodness and flourishing have swallowed corruption and death, when the bodily resurrection of Jesus spreads to all of us too.
Our new status with Jesus isn’t just a line item on some heavenly spreadsheet. Our new status is powerful. Because of our connection to God, we’re in the process of being transformed. This begins now and continues in our lives and neighborhoods until the great day of consummation, when all of nature will be restored.
So we work as a church, not merely to save souls, but to change lives—actual, everyday lives. We invest in our neighbors. We give money and time and supplies. We rebuild. We console. We serve. We hope.
3 Tools
Grace
Our number one ethic is grace. How are we going to achieve our goals of connection and redemption? Grace. It’s our ultimate paradigm and pattern and power. It’s the means by which we expect to change the world, and it’s the rule by which we run the church. In copying Jesus, we embody the same grace we receive, making Him tangible for each other and our world.
Grace means we live lives of generosity and giving people better than they deserve. Grace means we initiate and act. We love and enjoy each other. We live in vulnerability and openness. We welcome and embrace and include, without expectation. When we fight, we forgive. When we disagree, we stick together.
When we’re in hard situations or easy ones, when we’re joyful or angry, when we’re struggling or thriving, over and over, we seek the way of Jesus—we seek the way of grace.
Sharing
This way of grace opens us up to sharing. We actively invite others into our lives. We share meals and thoughts and material goods. We take care of each other. We enjoy each other.
Jesus did not die just to give us a personal, private relationship with God. He died to fix all that is wrong with the world, including our relationships, which can now be characterized by honesty and forgiveness instead of self-preservation and hiding. We’re fighting to live into relationships we were made for, and we do this by actively sharing.
This makes us a radically inclusive community—because our goal is to share in Jesus with absolutely everyone who wants to share in Jesus. Instead of splitting, we share. Instead of hiding, we share. Instead of running or excluding or taking any of the other measures of self-preservation that are so natural to us, we share. This is the beautiful way of Jesus.
Exploration
Even though we’re clinging to Jesus, we don’t yet have everything figured out. So we question, and we try and attempt and rethink, trying to connect with Him and each other, trying to share and live lives of grace. We love questions and doubters and thinkers and skeptics. If God is the source of all truth, then no pursuit of truth should ever scare us.
We dig into the scriptures, even the hard parts. We pray with expectation, even when our requests are so raw we’re afraid to fully hope. We look at things in new light, from new angles, considering with all our might how we can more consistently live the ways of Jesus and believe in Him.
We have staked our flag in time-tested truths of the gospel, the essentials of faith that have been handed down throughout the ages. Our leadership will persist and plead and proclaim these essentials, for what we believe makes us who we are. Yet we all expect to doubt and struggle, from the least of us to the greatest. And in those moments, we continue exploring. We keep feeling our way back to the God who’s excitedly and affectionately pursuing us too. We’re convinced that exploration will eventually lead us to true encounter, to true connection with Jesus.