A Missional Church | FCC Cleveland, TN

Our Missional Values

One of our values at Faith Connection is to be engaged in “missional” lifestyles.

Missional is a helpful term used to describe what happens when you and I replace the "come to us" invitations with a "go to them" life. With this view, “mission” shifts from naming a function of the church to describing its essential nature. In a missional church, the church IS mission rather than does mission as a program or activity.

The church's nature is to show the world what it looks like when a community of people live under the reign of God in every aspect of daily life through many diverse and culturally relevant expressions that engage communities locally and globally.

Faith Connection seeks to be more than a 'church' the way our society defines it.

Today, the English word "church" is often used to describe a building used as a Christian house of worship. In the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint translation) and later in the New Testament, the Greek word "ekklesia" that we translate "church" originally referred to people - God's people gathered to worship their God.

In that context, we are a community of individuals with diverse backgrounds, personalities, philosophies, ideas and visions; united by a relationship with Christ. We are a family called to be transformed and renewed together, while engaging our culture with the gospel in population segments outside of the church “facility”.

We seek to be a church that understands our place in culture; impacting our world through various forms of arts, music, film, literature, and other relevant forms of expression. We understand that to be the “salt of the earth” we must have proximity - to be in the world (culturally engaged), without being absorbed by it (not of the world). To be culturally engaged means we are part of the community God has sent us to, we don't shelter ourselves from it, nor are we above it. On the contrary, we seek to influence it.

We believe the Great Commission beckons us to a greater adventure than just religious “housekeeping”. Our passion is to take the church beyond the walls of a building and mobilize believers for outreach, evangelism, rescue missions, service projects, and community intervention; in a sense, making every believer a missionary and every family a missionary team.

In a missional environment, the people are the church and church is the people. Therefore, wherever God's people are corporately or individually, there is the church at its most tangible point of impact. Church is at home, at the mall, in the restaurant, the beach – wherever God's people find themselves in their daily lives, cultivating spiritual expressions.

Our goal as a church is to counter the unfortunate modern trend of being "keepers of the aquarium" which has, in too many religious communities, tragically replaced the command Jesus gave us to be "fishers of men". In that spirit, we strive to raise up indigenous leaders who will take the gospel of Jesus Christ to our communities locally and globally through cross-cultural and multi-ethnic contexts.

FCC is already engaged with local and national ministries, taking the gospel to many diverse people groups and cultural environments through programs for at-risk youth, juvenile detention center ministries, mentoring children of inmates, extreme sports outreaches, inner-city evangelism, and more.

At Faith Connection, we realize the call to participate in the ministry of seeing peoples' lives transformed through the message of the gospel goes far beyond our local community - and we look forward to you joining us in this great adventure and journey of faith.

Jesus has left the building and he beckons us to follow!

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