Ember Church Core Values: The Rest

Ember Church has seven core values: Gospel, Humility, Authenticity, Creativity, Community, Agape, and Truth. I've already blogged about Gospel and Humility. Rather than give each core value a separate entry, I thought I would just post the rest here with the comments that we had written up about them. Our first service is August 14 @ 5pm, and we meet at 401 E. Schrock Road in Westerville. We'd love to have you come worship with us!

Authenticity

There is a tremendous temptation for people, especially Christians, to maintain a façade of self-sufficiency—to put forth the appearance that everything is fine and that we’ve got it all together. This is deception, and is incongruent with the way of Jesus. We strive to be authentic people, developing open, honest, and intimate relationships with God and others.

Creativity

God created a world of exhilarating beauty and awe-inspiring magnificence, and then he created human beings in his image. We are designed to be creative beings, and our creativity is meant to be used in acts of worship. We strive to be a community that fosters our various creative gifts for the purpose of worshipping God.

Community

The way of Jesus is not something that can be walked alone. It is God’s intention that we live out our faith in local communities of fellow believers; we need each other in order to follow Jesus well. We strive to be a gospel community, committed to reconciling broken relationships, living as new creations in the resurrection of Jesus, and pursuing healing and wholeness through the forgiveness offered at the cross.

Agape

Agape is a Greek word used throughout the New Testament that we translate ‘love’. This is the love that we see on display at the cross of Christ; it is a love that lays down its life. Jesus said that agape love would be the defining characteristic of his disciples, and so we strive to be people who are defined by agape love—people who set aside their rights, who lay down their lives, and who forgive offenses, even at great cost to themselves.

Truth

Of all the statements of Jesus, his claim to be “the truth” is perhaps the boldest. Because we believe Jesus when he makes this claim, we are confident that a relentless pursuit of the truth will bring us back to Christ. We strive to know and understand the deep truths of God and the Scriptures, and we will not allow fear to stand in our way of knowing God deeply.

And here are the first two, just so that we can have all of them in the same place.

Gospel

The Gospel is the definitive message of Christian faith. We define it according to 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.” The Gospel is the story of what God has done in history to redeem humans from their sin; it is a world re-creating event that continues to live on in the community of Jesus' friends. We strive to center ourselves around the Gospel, letting it define and drive all that we do as a church.

Humility

At the root of everything God is and does, and all that he calls us to do and be, is humility. Pride is the fundamental betrayal of the way of life Jesus gave us. We strive to maintain an attitude of humility toward God, one another, other churches, and the unbelieving world.