Glorify God

Our supreme value is to honor and glorify God in everything we do as a church.

We value the bible as God’s gift to the church to be read for our instruction and comfort. Taking the Bible seriously means recognizing its transparency, expecting to see beyond the mere text to the mysterious presence.  We believe the Bible is the revelation of God to an imperfect humanity.  While God’s revelation is perfect, our understanding of it IS NOT. We always bring our own history, culture, and personality to our interpretation of Scripture. We also advocate reading and understanding the Bible in the cultural context in which it was written. The Beloved Community strives to seek God’s truth in the Biblical text by understanding the cultural context in which the text was written while simultaneously striving to discover the truth of God’s revelation for this generation of believers.

We value praise and worship that is authentic and acceptable to God (Rom. 12:1-12.   We believe that God inhabits the praises of God’s people and dwells in the atmosphere of God’s praise (Psalm 22:3). We believe that praise and worship is the vehicle of faith which brings us into the presence and power of God and allows us to enter the sacredness of God’s glory!

The Beloved Community is led by a team of leaders that are called out from among the community to demonstrate the Divinity of Life that is revealed every moment of our lives, and in doing so, to create a world of lasting compassion, justice, liberation and peace.  We believe that our commitment to one another is as important as our commitment to God, for God, through God’s agape love, promotes an all-inclusive, affirming spirit of personhood.  The beloved community is a community in which we strive to overcome our separateness, heal our divisions, restore our relationships and work towards reconciliation through transformation of the human heart.  The Beloved Community Church is committed to ensuring that no one stands alone. We make it a priority to shape authentic relationships where people can know and be known, love and be loved, serve and be served.

We value the theology of God’s loving, infinite grace as opposed to a legal/moral orientation which often results in ungrace (the practice of shame, guilt, punishment, judgment, condemnation) (Rom. 6:14).  We are eternally grateful that God saves us from sin, from our propensity for living in opposition to the will of God; for the essence of sin is that we continually choose self over God, even in the context of God’s unconditional love. The gospel of grace begins and ends with forgiveness. Grace alone melts ungrace.  God’s forgiveness is unconditional; it comes from a heart that does not demand anything for itself, a heart that is completely empty of self-seeking.  Like Jesus’ message from the parable of the ‘Prodigal Son,” we must serve Christ from hearts of unconditional love and gratitude by stepping outside our world of ungrace and entering God’s realm of infinite grace.

We value ministry that effectively communicates biblical truth in ways that people understand it (1Chron. 12:32). Therefore we will constantly evaluate our forms and methods, for we understand that our own social, cultural, and personal background shapes how we seek and understand the revelation of God.  We also understand that each generation is charged to seek and discover the power of God’s revelation in the current social, cultural climate and we seek to glorify God and do ministry in a context that can feed the sheep in a way that is relevant for this particular age and time.  We are also compelled to not just be participants, but transformers of the culture so that all can fully live into the promises of God.

We value every individual as extraordinary, uniquely crafted in the image of God with a voice to be heard, a gift to be used, knowledge to be shared and a service to be offered.  We are particularly conscious of embracing the poor, oppressed, disinherited and dispossessed as we follow Jesus’ foundational mission for ministry (Luke 4:18-19). We believe the church should operate as a unified community of servants maximizing the use of their spiritual gifts (Romans 12).

We value and are conscious of the ease with which any church or people can become insular and introspective.  Proverbs teaches, “any enterprise is built by wise planning, becomes strong through common sense, and profits wonderfully by keeping abreast of the facts” (24:3-4 Living Bible).  Part of this ‘keeping abreast’ is the ability to work with forward thinking that enables a church to change before it needs to.  Our desire is to embrace change for healthy growth and not simply because of growth.

We value total congregational involvement in ministry (Eph. 4:11-13).  Therefore, we seek to equip all our uniquely designed and God-gifted people to effectively accomplish the work of the ministry in a manner that is pleasing to God.

We value giving our best in service to God because God gave God’s best—God’s self through Jesus Christ our Savior (Col. 3:23-24).  Our conviction is that everything we do reflect the one for whom we’re doing it!  Paul encourages each of us to “live creatively…” (Gal. 6:1 The Message), which challenges us to attain a level of excellence that suitably reflects that of God. Therefore, we will seek to honor God by maintaining the highest standard of excellence in all our ministries and activities.