Our Core Values
You might be asking yourself “Why do we have this in addition to what is in the mission statement?” It’s because these reflect the things we find important in our life together as a church family: 1) Trusting the Bible as our guide for life; 2) Living in authentic relationships; 3) Loving and serving our community; 4) Treating others with grace as we grow together; 5) Enjoying the blessings of keeping God’s Sabbath.
1. Trusting the Bible as our guide for life:
We value Scripture and understand it to be the inspired Word of God. Because we understand the Bible to be the inspired word of God, we also see it as the final authority in how we approach questions of faith and practicing our faith. As God’s inspired Word, we turn to the Bible to guide us in our daily life.
2. Living in authentic relationships:
Relationships are important to us. We view the church as God’s family and see repeated calls in the Bible to love one another. Authentic relationships means that we share life together, we don’t have to put on a ‘mask’ with each other and we can be open with one another about struggles and our feelings. We are all on this journey of faith together and we walk alongside each other as we go into those new frontiers of faith. Life is messy and we are okay loving each other in the midst of messiness.
3. Loving and serving our community:
Alongside of loving one another inside the church family, we see that God has called us to love our neighbors as well. We believe that Jesus meant to love our neighbors and communities with authentic genuine love, not merely a head knowledge that I should care for others. This means that we believe that love needs to be put into action, which means we will serve the needs of our community in their hurts and seek areas where we can genuinely be a blessing to our community.
4. Treating others with grace as we grow together:
We touched on this a bit above in authentic relationships. We are human, that means that we will fail to treat each other with perfect love at times, and also that though we are saved and redeemed, we are still sinners. What that means practically is that we need to be filled with grace toward each other as we all strive to better follow Jesus. This doesn’t mean that we excuse sin or treating one another badly, but rather that we will address these things with the love and grace that God shows us.
5. Enjoying the blessings of keeping God’s Sabbath:
One of the things that makes us unique as Seventh Day Baptists is that we recognize the blessing of God’s Sabbath. If you’re not sure you understand what we mean by Sabbath, hang in there, we will touch on this more later. We recognize that God designed the world to work with a certain rhythm to it and we find in the Bible that God desired that we would get all of our work done in six days and on the seventh day we would rest from our labor and find rest in God. We also recognize that the Bible says that there is a blessing associated with God’s Sabbath, so we value that highly as a church