Our ministry philosophy is simple: we strive to have everything we do centered on the ancient, powerful gospel of Jesus Christ. Our goal is to be always gazing into the face of Jesus and His life-changing cross. Many rightly see the gospel as the means of entrance into a relationship with Christ, while tragically failing to see it as the means of growth in that relationship. While we believe that the gospel is certainly the only message that will save a lost world, we also believe it is the only message which brings about the church’s maturity.
To that end, we see the Bible – in all of its beautiful styles and varied portions – existing for the purpose of displaying the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is in the creation and fall, that we see the need for redemption and new creation in Christ. It is in the impossibility of the Law’s demands that we see our need for Christ the Law-Keeper. It is in the promises and redemptive themes running throughout the Bible that we see the need for Christ who fulfills them. It is in the shadows and types of the Old Testament that we see Christ as the Great Antitype. It is in the rescue of Israel from earthly foes that we see Christ’s climactic deliverance of the church from spiritual enemies. This is how Jesus saw the Scriptures (e.g., Luke 24:27), and so we purpose to see them in this same way.
As such, we are committed to doing discipleship, counseling, training, worship, teaching and preaching – everything we do as a church – in a way that points to and derives power from Jesus’ cross. We purpose to showcase Jesus’ atoning death which achieves divine pardon of our guilt and the gift of His perfect righteousness which results in God’s acceptance of us. We call this our “Gospel-Centered Approach.” It is this approach that frees us from the fruitless pursuit of securing God’s love by means of our self-righteousness and wrongly heaping condemnation on ourselves in our defeats. By embracing the gospel as our everyday hope, we can then rest solely in what Jesus has done (and what He will yet do) as the basis of God’s ongoing joy in us. This, in turn, produces an overwhelming thanksgiving in our hearts that empowers us to defeat sin and grow in holiness. We believe this gospel-centered approach to be the key to ministry that avoids legalism as well as lawlessness. As a result, we are vigilant about guarding the gospel, as it is our only hope for salvation and our only hope for transformational growth in our Christian walk.
Jerry Bridges put it well in The Discipline of Grace: “This is the gospel by which we were saved, and it is the gospel by which we must live every day of our Christian lives.”