Our Values & Dreams

Values

We believe that anyone can experience great things from Jesus. The greatest thing that Jesus offers is relationships. These relationships are our highest value.

First of all, real connection to the living God.  If we can't really connect to God, why have church at all. The whole point of Mercy is to help people connect to God.

Second of all, deep, life changing friendships. Above all else, it is relationships with each other that give color and vibrancy to life, and to church. Nothing else is more important than loving God and loving people.

Dreams

In one sense, we have as many dreams for our church as people that attend.  However, since we started, six core dreams have shaped our community.

  1. Evangelism: This just means we want to love and bless people who don't go to our church, not just the people who do. Jesus is good news for everyone, not just church people.
  2. Discipleship: This means that people in our church will keep growing as people and as followers of Jesus for a lifetime. We don't want stagnant, boring lives.
  3. Social Justice: We think a church should make an impact by serving the community and working to make our community whole. We hope that if we disappeared, we'd be missed.
  4. Intellectual Honesty: We don't just want to believe things out of blind faith. Instead, we want to engage honestly and thoughtfully with the culture we live in.
  5. Silence and Contemplation: We love the city, but it can be a loud, busy place with an overabundance of things to do. We want to cultivate deep lives, to know how to be quiet inside to hear God's voice.
  6. Supernatural: We want to experience the living God in real ways. We believe that God actually does miracles and speaks to people today. How much fun is that?

Distinctives

There are lots of churches, and we love all of them.  If you are trying to decide whether our church is for you, here are a few ways that we might be different from some other churches.

We are process-oriented. 

Exploring faith is a lifelong journey.  We want to help with the next step toward God, whatever that might be for you.  Another way this has been described is being "centered-set."

The easiest way to understand what "centered-set" means is to contrast it with "bounded set."  "Bounded set" is a religious system in which all people are classified as "in" or "out" and the primary goal is to get people from the outside in.  The upside of this sort of church is that it is very focused on its goal of getting people to change their religious category.  The downside is that many people don't find religious categories to be very helpful.

In contrast, "centered set" faith places Jesus at the center and encourages anyone who want to try taking a step towards him, in some way.  It isn't trying to force someone into an all-or-nothing decision, or assuming that a person will immediately change all their beliefs and opinions.  Rather, it simply believes that if people will take a step toward Jesus, they will find him to be loving and helpful.

We are experientially-oriented.

We believe in a living God who actually reveals himself to people through Jesus.  Our goal is to help people connect to his life-giving power.  To contrast with another approach, we are not as interested in convincing people that a certain set of beliefs is true.

That isn't to say that we value experience over belief, or emotion over intellect.  We simply think that for most people, experience with God comes first, and then intellectually honest reflection on that experience comes second.  A friend of ours has coined the term "Stage 4 Faith" to express this idea - you can read an interesting article about it.

We are multiculturally-oriented.

By this we don't specifically mean that we are a multiethnic church, though we are always striving for more ethnic diversity.  But regardless of our ethnic makeup, we are very committed to understanding the various ways that Jesus reveals himself in different cultures.

This means not only being sensitive to the needs of different cultures, but also actively seeking to learn from different ways of worshipping God and relating to each other.