At Redemption Church we share a common life of worship and mission, centered on the lordship of Jesus Christ. We’re committed to the idea that God calls us to live in faithfulness to Christ, and to Christ’s body, the church. We don’t have a mission, per se; God has a mission, and we’re called together by the Spirit in the service of that mission. So our overall focus is on faithfulness instead of growth, or perceived success.
“Faithfulness instead of growth.”
It’s customary to represent a church’s life with a slogan or a tagline. But we’ve noticed over the years that God routinely calls us beyond what we think we can be, leading us to discover new aspects of what it means to be the church. So instead of a mission statement, we’ve worked to discern a common language, a shared vocabulary, for what it means to be caught up in the mission of God in this particular neighborhood. We’ve settled on four central pursuits that describe our common life: worship, mission, discipleship, and wholeness.
We choose the word pursuits carefully. These aren’t requirements for membership. Anyone who desires to follow Jesus can be a part of this community. Nor are they accomplishments. Our constant confession is that we’re all struggling under the weight of one kind of brokenness or another. Rather, they’re descriptions of the concrete practices we hope will anchor our lives in the pursuit of God’s mission of redemption. Over time, these pursuits have come to describe the core of our common life, and to guide us in our spiritual journey on both a corporate and personal level.
“Our constant confession is that we are all struggling under the weight of one kind of brokenness or another.”
More than anything else, we’ve come to believe that being a part of Redemption Church involves a long obedience in the same direction … faithfulness over time.
We sometimes call ourselves a ragamuffin church, meaning we aren’t terribly polished or sophisticated, but we place a high value on being genuine and sincere. We take risks and try not to hold anything back when it comes to our commitment to God’s mission. We probably fail as often as we succeed. But over time, this practice has given us confidence that God has us, and that God will keep us. This confidence matters deeply if we’re going to care for those living on the margins of our neighborhood and our city.