The Gospel Changes Everything.
“I had always,” wrote G. K. Chesterton, “felt life first as a story, and if there is a story, there is a Story-teller.”
We are all carefully placed in a larger Story than our own. It’s only when we hear the voice of the Story-teller that we learn to find our place in the larger narrative. We believe in the power of the Gospel Story — that God uses it to redeem, repair, and restore broken narratives into this deeper and more compelling Story.
Because the Gospel changes everything.
As author Sally Lloyd-Jones writes, the Gospel “is an adventure story where the Hero comes from a far country to win back His treasure. A love story where a Brave Prince leaves His palace, His throne — everything — to rescue the one He loves. ... [A]nd it takes the whole Bible to tell this Story.” Only a Story so drastic and radical has the power to guide the journey of the traveler whose feet have been shaped by the contours of this disenchanted world. The celestial city may seem too distant, as the weight of days meet us in heavy dread.
But that distant traveler from a far country comes to meet us in our stumbling and weariness. As He’s examined each footstep of our journey, He invites us to observe His journey up a hill on a dark Friday afternoon. For the cross, the place where Jesus died the death we should have died having lived the life we should have but couldn’t live, is the paradoxical portal where we fall upward into God’s grace. Here is the well of grace where sinners hear of forgiveness and where love covers deep shame.
Everybody needs a redemption story, and it starts with the acknowledgement that we are not the solution to our own problems. Yet, we know the one who is, and it’s His Story we continue to tell. G. K. Chesterton writes: “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” Each week, we tell the Story of the great dragon slayer who defeated the ancient dragon once and for all. For while our words and promises are often transient and hollow, Jesus’ are indelibly marked on the palms of His hands.
For here at Christ Our Redeemer, we truly believe that the Gospel changes everything.
Our Values
01 Gospel Centrality Jesus taught that all the Scriptures pointed to Him (Lk 24:27). And we believe that the Gospel is not just our centered focus but the very means for existing as a church. For we believe in the centering power of the Gospel that provides a compass to guide the wayward and drops the anchor for those drifting in doubt. For we all lose track of our steps and sight of our God. But in our commitment to weekly preaching the Gospel, we participate in the regular work of reorienting our hearts.
02 Meaningful Worship Nick Wolterstorff describes the initiating action of God when we come to worship. It is God, by His grace, who comes to meet His broken, wayward, and sinful people. Our desire is to be a church that’s driven to movement not by the law or by works but by the compelling power of grace — and to do so with every movement in our liturgy through our hearing, singing, praying, and confessing. For our belief is that there is otherworldly power in the Gospel of Jesus (1 Cor 1:18).
03 The Transforming Safety of Gospel Community We are all created for community. For some of us, false semblances of community are where wounds occurred and where we learned self-preserving habits of hiding and isolation. In the safety of the Gospel Story, forgiveness is offered to the guilty, home is opened to the prodigal, covering is given to the shamed. In Jesus, we are an assembled people of differences who find commonality in something more deeply binding in our need for grace.
04 Culture of Grace The culture is the air we breathe. With a regular commitment to confession, repentance, and restoration, our desire is to provide an atmosphere where we might breathe in air that isn’t legalistic, shaming, suffocating, or toxic — but rather, that we might breathe in from the atmosphere of grace what’s life-giving and liberating. And through this commitment, it’s our conviction that it would create sacred spaces in our community toward transparency, reconciliation, and healing.
05 Missional Partnerships With the Gospel, there is a centrifugal force and power that compels us toward the mission of God. Our conviction is that we don’t do this alone but together — alongside local congregations and ministries in our city and county, while also in accountability and connection with our broader denomination and sister churches. In our relationships, in our communities, and in our city, our aim is to confront the altars of idolatry that surround us through Gospel partnership.
Our Beliefs & Affiliation
We’re a confessional church, which means that what we believe and hold to are expressed in a confession — an organized summary of key biblical truths about who God is, who we are, and how He relates to us. And thus, we belong as a member church in the PCA (Presbyterian Church in America), a family of churches in the Reformed tradition whose unifying beliefs are summarized in the Westminster Confession of Faith, along with its Shorter and Larger Catechisms. These are not without error — only the Bible is — but they outline biblical truths succinctly and helpfully. Being confessional says that the Christian faith is bigger than just us and is connected to churches across time and place. We embrace our belonging to historic Christianity, whose tradition is rooted in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments and summarized in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.