Our Mission in Depth

 

Further thoughts on Grassroots’ Mission…

Authored: Former Pastor Keith Jagger

 

Our goal as a community is to inspire acts of selfless love. Whether given at work, or home, or randomly among our neighbors, we think that selfless love is the DNA of God’s Kingdom. Joining in with God as He builds his Kingdom, we want to spread this Jesus-like love at our every turn.  But for us humans who are born with a selfish flare, this is not easy. So, we celebrate acts of selfless love when we see them, and we gather as students to learn and be formed by Jesus’s heart.

That’s why we gather around this love in community, learning to give it and receive it and forgiving one another until we are finished growing—which is a whole-life project.  We study Jesus and his selfless love in small gatherings and on Sunday mornings. We enter into Jesus’s life in worship and prayer, receiving his love and being tutored in the ways of sacrificial giving.  And then we go and translate this love from head to heart to hands, growing and serving in the world around us. We meet together in home groups, we sponsor refugees, we break bread together, we teach what it feels like to know and worship God, we are really good at feeding one another with meal trains, and we devote ourselves to prayer and the word. We experience God in music and art, and sit at His feet listening to sermons and seminars. We gather our community resources for learning, and local service, and picnics, and then keep space in our lives for those without family nearby. And whatever is left over we give away.

We long to cover the earth with the selfless love of Jesus.

Our approach to this work makes us think of ourselves as explorers.

  • We value the honest work of naming doubts and working through them. We don’t ask anybody to check their brains at the door.
  • We want to shape inspirational and educated disciples who inspire those around him—and who know why it is they believe what they believe.
  • We are constantly looking for ways to shelter people around us in vulnerable situations.
  • We are working to take a strong stand against racism, looking to undercut the social evils that weave around and through us.
  • We take seriously sins against God’s creation.
  • We also take Jesus seriously when he challenges us to be holy and generous.
  • We submit ourselves to the authority of God expressed in the scriptures.
  • We strive to stay on mission and out of the raging currents of consumerism.
  • And we stand firmly aside our brothers and sisters struggling with sin and addiction, calling one another into the light of life.

    This is not a liberal church or a conservative church. It stands outside those unhelpful kinds of categories.

    We are trying to follow and worship Jesus our Lord and open the eyes of many to the source of all love—Christ himself.