Glimpse of the future:
“WHAT IF CHURCH WASN'T A PLACE YOU GO, BUT WHO YOU ARE?”
What if a few neighbors lived out faith with you in the everyday rhythms of life? You'd share meals, watch one another’s kids, party together, serve others, restore what's broken in your community, talk about Jesus a lot and see people begin to follow him. It would be messy and it would be glorious.
Lighthouse Covenant Church is committed to making disciples in Missional Communities. Missional Communities are a central environment for us to Be The Church as the priesthood of believers.
Disciples of Jesus increasingly submit to Him in all of life, are being changed by Him, obey Him, and teach others to do the same. Discipleship is the process of bringing all of life under the lordship and empowering presence of Jesus Christ. In order to accomplish the mission of making disciples, MC’s create an environment where life-on-life, life-in-community, and life-on-mission can occur.
When a discipleship environment maintains a faithful tension regarding Gospel/Scriptural truth, community, spiritual disciplines, accountability, and mission, we see the fruitful advance of the Gospel. This looks like evangelism and edification, new believers coming to trust in Jesus, and maturing believers being conformed to the image of Christ.
Lighthouse Covenant Church is committed to making disciples in Missional Communities. Missional Communities are a central environment for us to Be The Church as the priesthood of believers.
Disciples of Jesus increasingly submit to Him in all of life, are being changed by Him, obey Him, and teach others to do the same. Discipleship is the process of bringing all of life under the lordship and empowering presence of Jesus Christ. In order to accomplish the mission of making disciples, MC’s create an environment where life-on-life, life-in-community, and life-on-mission can occur.
- Life-on-life: Being together in the everyday allows for visibility and accessibility. We see each other’s lives in the everyday stuff so that people know what it looks like to follow Jesus in all of life. With familiarity and accountability, we are able to assess and encourage growth in discipleship.
- Life-in-community: One on one discipleship will lead to a disciple looking like the one who discipled them. Community discipleship will lead to disciples looking more like Jesus as he works through the diverse people and gifts in his body. Community is also the context in which we care for each other as a good family and live out the one-another passages of Scripture (e.g., bear one another’s burdens, pray for one another, submit to one another, etc.)
- Life-on-mission: Mission reveals areas of life that need repentance and ensures we are equipping people to make disciples who make disciples. In order to lead people to see all of life as worship and discipleship, we must equip disciples to engage the everyday with Gospel intentionality–doing what they would normally do differently in light of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.
When a discipleship environment maintains a faithful tension regarding Gospel/Scriptural truth, community, spiritual disciplines, accountability, and mission, we see the fruitful advance of the Gospel. This looks like evangelism and edification, new believers coming to trust in Jesus, and maturing believers being conformed to the image of Christ.
CONTEXTUALIZATION & DIVERSITY:
God has reconciled all peoples into a multiethnic family in Christ [Eph 2:11-22] God has also given us a ministry of reconciliation. This means we follow Jesus’ humble example in the Incarnation. Jesus emptied Himself and came to our turf and communicated on our terms so the Gospel could be communicated without cultural hindrance. LCC attempts to remove any unnecessary cultural offenses to the Gospel, as we seek to be a welcoming community for all-comers in the places God has sent us.
Every team and cultural context are different. God will grant each group a unique combination of capacity, calling and gifting that suits the context He sends them to for the work He calls them to do there. Just like every family member has things in common while expressing their commonalities in unique ways, a church of missional communities expects to see our common convictions expressed with great diversity and contextual considerations. To reveal this beautiful theological reality in a North American context, we intentionally pursue a multiethnic expression of the church that approaches the diversity of the average public school in our context.
We also believe we are responsible neither to retreat from our culture nor to conform to it. Instead, we are to engage culture boldly with humility and through the Spirit and the truth of the Gospel as we seek its transformation and submission to the lordship of Christ.
Every team and cultural context are different. God will grant each group a unique combination of capacity, calling and gifting that suits the context He sends them to for the work He calls them to do there. Just like every family member has things in common while expressing their commonalities in unique ways, a church of missional communities expects to see our common convictions expressed with great diversity and contextual considerations. To reveal this beautiful theological reality in a North American context, we intentionally pursue a multiethnic expression of the church that approaches the diversity of the average public school in our context.
We also believe we are responsible neither to retreat from our culture nor to conform to it. Instead, we are to engage culture boldly with humility and through the Spirit and the truth of the Gospel as we seek its transformation and submission to the lordship of Christ.