Core Values
Loving Jesus Together
Our simple Mission Statement of, “Loving Jesus Together” does a lot for keeping us focused on the heart of the Christian life together. We are a community that is devoted to Jesus. He has loved us, and the primary focus of the Christian life is to love him as a community. Just as we couldn’t love Jesus without him loving us first, we can’t love Jesus alone. We need each other to love Jesus. We need Jesus because we are more flawed than we could possibly know, but in Jesus we are more loved by God than we could possibly understand.
Core Values: How do we do this together?
Our core values help us accomplish loving Jesus together. Our core values are:
- Keep everything focused on Jesus
- Treasure orthodox Christian doctrine
- Pursue spiritual renewal for all disciples
- Equip women and men for God’s mission
Keeping everything focused on Jesus
The Good News of God isn’t a passport to Heaven, it is Jesus Christ himself. Jesus shows us God’s redeeming, renewing heart through his death and resurrection. Jesus personally cares for each of us, having borne our sins, shame and weakness upon his Cross. Now, he welcomes into a personal relationship with Him, with his people. Our lives are often busy, with difficult and mirky decisions and dynamics facing us every day. For our life as a church, we know we can easily get off course. We are committed to keeping everything we do as a church focused on Jesus.
Treasure orthodox Christian doctrine
We love the Bible and all that God reveals about himself to us through his Word. Thus, we preach expositionally on Sunday’s through books of the Bible, because we love God’s Word. Additionally, we root our doctrinal heritage in the long line of believer’s who’ve loved the Bible before us. Believers have studied God’s word in various cultures for over two thousand years! While our context in Manchester is different, our faith is one and the same as believers throughout history. So, we love to recite things like the Nicene Creed or portions of the Heidelberg Catechism in our services. At different times and places, historic Christian teaching will conflict with the culture. This both drives us to better understand the issues, but also offers us a rich Christian tradition to learn from to better understand how to please the Lord in our time and place.
Pursue spiritual renewal for all disciples
A key part of knowing and following Jesus is experiencing God in our lives. For all believers, new or old, this relationship with God needs regular care and attention. It can often be bewildering to hold a book that’s 2,000 years old and be told that God speaks life into our souls simply through reading it! At King’s Cross, we want all believers to be helped in pursuing personal, spiritual renewal in Jesus through his Word and Prayer on a regular basis. This means that we prioritize people, relationships and a quiet life over programs and presentations. We do run classes on spiritual renewal from time to time, and care about helping people find simple steps to experience more of God in their lives.
Equip women and men for God’s mission
Jesus gave us the Holy Spirit to faithfully obey his command to make disciples of all people. Discipleship is at the heart of who we are as Christians and a church. We see discipleship as a key aspect of God’s mission to make new and more disciples. Our folks are from all walks of life – each is specifically redeemed and renewed by God to join his mission to spread the fame of Jesus wherever they are. So we look to equip people to join Jesus mission, right where they are in life. But this also means that we disciple and equip people to join Jesus mission in new places that he may be leading us. Thus, we work to equip and empower disciples to join Jesus’ mission in the Manchester area and beyond. This means we’re intentionally discipling people into church planting and global missions, in whatever ways God has gifted them to be a part of his mission.
Under the hood: What’s our DNA?
Confessional in the Reformed Tradition
We are a part Trinity Fellowship Churches (TFC), a connectional, missional and confessional denomination. The TFC Confession of Faith is largely rooted in the London Baptist Confession of 1689, a key Reformed Baptist confessional document. The TFC Confession of Faith has been modernized and modified in minor ways (e.g. modernized English, adding sections on God’s mission, removing unnecessary language, etc). The most important factor about our confession is that it works as a guiding, objective document about several key doctrines of Christian teaching. We are Reformed in many key areas, and being confessional means our faith is guided by a common proclamation about who God is, not the whims of our pastors or culture. Our confession of faith also gives people a sense of what type of Biblical teaching they will experience from our pastors.
Connected and accountable with other churches
As a member church of TFC, we have structures of accountability and connection with other churches articulated in our Book of Church Order. This is not the only way to achieve these goals, but King’s Cross feels that the easiest way to experience partnership and accountability with other churches is through TFC. This means that when there are local concerns or problems, members of King’s Cross have denominational structures to appeal to for help. It means that King’s Cross is committed to certain principles and dynamics of how we lead locally, because we’ve agreed with other churches in TFC that they are the way we will function as local churches.
Committed to church planting locally and globally
To keep this value central and vibrant in our life together, we are a part of the Acts 29 Network of churches. This is not a denominational organization, but a diverse, global family of churches who plant churches, together. We have loved our partnership with Acts 29. Every Sunday we pray for a different global Acts 29 church as a way of reminding ourselves that we are a part of a global church in Christ. We have benefited tremendously from Acts 29 conferences, seminars and assessments. They’ve helped us be better local missionaries. We also assisted with coaching and assessments for church planters, and financially support Acts 29 work. We hope that as we move forward, we can send out foreign missionaries through our Acts 29 network of churches.
Built for our local community
Manchester is an amazing city in many ways, and struggles with many dynamics. One of the major dynamics facing our city is the drug crisis, which has claimed the lives of our neighbors, family and members. Because we are committed to joining God’s renewing work in Manchester, we meet in the Hope Addiction Recovery Center. This space is in the neighborhood where many of us live, and more importantly, tangibly addresses a key area of need in our city. We are extremely grateful for the work God is doing through Hope, and regularly work with them to serve our city. We know that meeting in a Recovery Center may not be too everybody’s liking, but this is why we meet at Hope: We are intentionally built as a church to be on the front doorstep of our community’s needs, eager to serve however we can, just like Jesus.
What do we want to be known for?
A compassionate community of Christ followers where people in pain and suffering find hope and healing.
Each of us comes to Jesus with a broken background. In our life together, we regularly see people who’ve experienced trauma and abuse from all types of backgrounds. Whether it’s domestic or sexual abuse, to religious or spiritual abuse, our congregation has continually become a home for those who are weary from their suffering. We want to be a people who are known for their compassion, just like our Savior. We want to be a congregation where people who’ve experienced trauma of all kinds can find hope and healing in Jesus, with fellow sufferer’s beside them.
A Christ-centered community that helps build healthy churches, with healthy leaders, for their local community.
We are excited about what God is doing in all different types of communities. It is our hope to be people who model healthy leadership and churches for a local community where others can be trained and equipped to serve wherever God has called them. We have no illusions about being perfect! What we hope to be is a people who are spiritually and emotionally healthy, amidst the demands of ministry, that can be used to strengthen and deploy others into their local missionary work.
A happy, holy, humble community of diverse believers.
If anyone has visited King’s Cross, they will know we are a diverse group of people, from all types of backgrounds. We’ve all been redeemed and joined to Jesus Christ who is renewing all things. While there are certainly very real, painful, difficult dynamics in life, we want to be a happy people because of who Jesus sis, what he has done, and is doing! This doesn’t mean people won’t struggle with depression or mental health, or that people experiencing those afflictions aren’t among us already. It means that we aim for a happiness and humility based on Jesus, not our circumstances. We want to be a people that are like Jesus – holy. Each of these areas requires a lifetime of discipleship, with many different twists and turns in our life together. But it is our hope to be known as a happy, holy, humble group of people because of Jesus.
A community focused on the needs of our neighbors immediately around us.
There are a lot of needs in our world. But we don’t live in the world in general, we live in our specific zip code. We don’t pay general bills, we pay bills for where we live – Manchester and the surrounding area. Manchester’s issues are different and unique to Manchester. This is where God has placed us, and we want to learn, think and work to address the needs of our neighbors immediately around us, because that’s what Jesus meant when he said “Love thy neighbor”.