Our Vision

Our Heart’s Longing

Psalm 34:8 declares, Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.” Talking with a Samaritan woman, Jesus said to her, “Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14). He offered himself to her as a soul-quenching source of goodness. In John’s gospel, Jesus is recorded as saying to a crowd, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever” (John 6:51). Jesus repeatedly claimed to be the one we need for life: the food we need to nourish our souls; the water we need to satisfy our heart’s longings. “Come to me,” Jesus says, “all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). He invites us to believe in his goodness. To trust in Him as the One who can save us from sin and death, satisfy our longings, and give us true peace and joy. 

The Aroma of Christ

As those who have tasted and seen that Jesus is good, we long to demonstrate and declare his goodness to others. We desire for our church to embody the goodness of Jesus in our fellowship together as God’s people–to make it palpable to our neighbors. 2 Corinthians 2:15 says that we (the body of Christ) are the aroma of Christ to the world. We want people to smell the sweetness of Jesus when they are in our midst. Jesus told his disciples, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). As we live in relationships of love, as we care for and serve one another, as we outdo one another in showing honor, as we give each other the benefit of the doubt, and as we look out for each others’ interests, we demonstrate how good Jesus truly is. Then our gospel message will resonate and truly seem like good news as we tell our friends, neighbors, and coworkers about Jesus. 

A People on Mission

Before he departed, Jesus instructed his disciples, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” He commissioned his disciples to continue his mission, taking the gospel from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. That mission continues even now as we who profess to follow Jesus live as his faithful witnesses and carry on the task of making disciples. From our front porches to frontier contexts, we are sent to declare the message that Jesus is the Savior and Satisfier of mankind. He is the One our hearts long for and the One we need. He is supremely good. 

Our VALUES

TRUTH

We live in a day in which there is strong belief in personal truth, but serious skepticism toward absolute, overarching truth claims. As followers of Christ, we acknowledge that Jesus not only made many objective truth statements, at the center of them was the claim He made about Himself in John 14:6 when He said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” Jesus professed Himself to be at the center of absolute, life-giving Truth. As a church, we deeply value Jesus and His teachings as our source of what is true. We value the Bible as a faithful record of His life and message, and we seek to follow and obey what it says.

HUMILITY

God’s Word says that He opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble (1 Pet. 5:5, James 4:6). As people who desperately long for and need God’s grace, we deeply value humility as the pathway to experiencing the Lord’s favor. Humility takes shape in the form of prayer, honesty and worship. In prayer we position ourselves as needy and dependent: we don’t have the strength to do life on our own. We are reliant upon the Holy Spirit for help and guidance. In honesty we admit our weaknesses and our struggles, and we confess our sins to one another. Through confession we find healing, forgiveness, and encouragement to persevere. In worship, we reorient our lives away from self-focus and back toward God, remembering that we were made to know and enjoy Him as the supreme focus of our lives.

COMMUNITY

There are 59 unique “one another” commands in the New Testament. It is impossible to be a faithful disciple of Jesus without a deep connection to the body of Christ. God made us for relationships and His Kingdom advances in and through us as we live in fellowship with one another, engaging in the mission of making disciples together. We value the beauty of unity-in-diversity: celebrating our differences while we pursue the glory of Jesus as brothers and sisters who have been reconciled together by his blood. We long for City Life Church to be a community from all cultures where Christ is King.

GOODNESS

Goodness is essential to God's character and is revealed in His actions. Simply put: God is good and does good. As His redeemed children, God longs for His goodness to be manifest in our lives so that we reflect and demonstrate His goodness to others. While there are many aspects of God’s goodness, we emphasize three: we desire to be a church known for justice, beauty, and mercy. We advocate for the oppressed and stand up for what is right. We celebrate creativity and the arts as a critical outworking of what it means to be made in God’s image. And we long to express kindness and mercy to others in light of the mercy we have experienced through the gospel.

PURPOSE

We believe every life is meaningful because every human is made in God’s image. Without having done or accomplished anything, life is inherently valuable. Therefore, we value all human life as precious, whether it is an unborn child, a refugee, an immigrant, a person with a disability, or someone with a terminal health issue. No matter one’s criminal record, social class, or socioeconomic status, every human matters, and it is our desire to help instill a sense of dignity and purpose in peoples’ lives by helping them know why they exist. We believe purpose is found by living to know Christ and to make Him known. The Westminster Confession states it well, “Man’s chief end is to know God and enjoy Him forever.”