We do this through a life rhythm of looking up, looking in, turning toward and reaching out. 

Looking Up—nothing to fear

Wholehearted living springs from grounding ourselves in God’s unwavering love and acceptance. (1 John 3:1) There’s a lot of talk about the importance of loving yourself—we are all for that, but in our experience we aren’t very good at it—we often are way too hard on ourselves and/or sometimes we aren’t hard enough. (1 John 3:19-20) The most foundational practice for a follower of Jesus is to regularly reorient themselves around the truth of who Jesus reveals God to be and who this God says we are.  

This helps to inform what our weekly big gatherings are all about. It’s a time for us to all come together and attune ourselves to the truest thing that we know—God is good and we are loved.  

At the same time we want to be a community that encourages and helps to inform a practice of LOOKING UP on a daily basis. It doesn’t take long for us to become distracted and disoriented and so we need more than a weekly check in. In the Gospel of John, Jesus invites us to abide in him and to abide in the love God has for us. The word here means, "to dwell in” or,  "to make our home in.” Can you imagine how different our lives would be if we could learn to live from a place of love and acceptance? Yeah, that would be something wouldn’t it?  

At Emmaus Church we are convinced that committing to intentional spiritual practices and disciplines are one of the primary ways we partner with the Spirit of God to make the truth of the Gospel more and more real in our lives. We want to come along side of you in your commitment to take on a more contemplative and rhythm-ed life with God through practices such as Scripture reading, prayer, fasting, intentional community to name a few. 

Looking In—nothing to hide

LOOKING UP and LOOKING IN really go hand in hand. Once we ground ourselves in God’s unwavering love and acceptance we find that we are then able to turn our attention inwards so that we can bring to light all of the various ways we haven’t allowed God’s grace to go deep enough. The scriptures tell us that God’s grace is meant to lead us toward repentance (Romans 2:4)…to change. We are convinced that one of the healthiest things we can do is be honest with ourselves about ourselves and one of the unhealthiest things we can do is believe our own B.S.  

We want to be the kind of community that encourages healthy self-awareness through practices of introspection, confession, and story telling.  

Turning Toward—nothing to prove

Think for a moment how a regular practice of LOOKING UP and LOOKING IN would begin to influence the way we interact with one another…pretty great, right? One of the fruits of living from a place of acceptance by God and honesty with ourselves is that we enter into relationships knowing we have nothing to prove. Our shared life is one of the primary ways the Spirit of God continues to work in us and it also is one of the primary ways we demonstrate to the watching world a new way to be human (Colossians 3:1-11) 

This all fleshes itself out practically at Emmaus Church through Life Groups. In a Life Group we commit to intentional relationships that are centered on vulnerability, compassion, and truth telling.  

Reaching Out—everything to offer

Wholehearted Living ultimately leads to waking up to the fact that we have something to offer the world. Ephesians 2:10 says that we have been handcrafted to participate with God in shaping the world into the kind of place God intends it to be.  

We want to be the kind of community that encourages and challenges you to leverage your life and everything about it for good because here’s the truth...you really do have so much to give. Your abilities, your passions, your successes, your failures, your strengths and your weakness are not yours to sit on, but they are yours to offer up as a gift to the world around you. 

WIDE-EYED PARTICIPATION

The first person in the scriptures to name God is a woman by the name of Hagar. She was an Egyptian slave who served the patriarch Abraham and his wife Sara. You can read about her in Genesis 16, but when she and her baby are sent off into the wilderness, she cries out to God to rescue them and God shows up and provides for their needs. Tamar names God El Roi, which means, “The God who sees me.”

The great story of the Exodus, when the nation of Israel was delivered out of Egypt and freed from slavery, begins with God saying saying to Moses, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering.”

There’s this great encounter in the gospels between Jesus and this woman who had a debilitating condition that left her hunched over. Her ailment would have put her on the outside of her community. The assumption would have been that her condition was the result of some sort of sin that God was punishing. In Luke 13 it says, “When Jesus saw her, he called her forward and said to her, “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.”

When Jesus saw her…you have to wonder how long it had been since anyone “saw” her…

We have a God who sees and we long to be a people who see as well. 

Taking up the invitation to participate with our lives often begins from a place of disruption—when our eyes are opened to something in our world that just isn’t ok. 

This is one of things that makes the way of Jesus so counter cultural. Our part of the world is obsessed with comfort and security and encourages us to get as much as we can, as fast as we can, and hold on to it for as long as we can. The way of Jesus calls us to not turn a blind eye toward the injustice of the world, but to go looking for it. When Jesus calls us to take up our cross he isn’t calling us to simply endure the random difficulty that comes our way, but to intentionally look for suffering in the world and then do something about it. 

We want to be a church that incites wide-eyed participation. We will be diligent in partnering with people and organizations in the Midlands who are working hard to change their communities and at the same time we want to be an epicenter of new and creative ways to bring good into the world.

*Subject to change

We are not alone

We are convinced that there is more to reality than what we can explain, understand, study in our labs, or contain in our doctrines. There is a transcendent, deeply personal God that is for us, with us, and ahead of us—who is responsible for our existence, incessantly drawing us closer, bringing us together and pulling us forward.  

The Gospel is good news

Jesus reveals God is most clearly seen and experienced through the person and work of Jesus Christ…and this is really good news!  

Jesus shows us who God is. Richard Rohr once said, "Jesus did not come to change God’s mind about us, but instead Jesus came to change our mind about God.” The God revealed to us in Jesus is way better, and at the same time way more unsettling, than anything we could have come up with ourselves.  

Jesus also shows us who we are meant to be and what life looks like when it is lived to the fullest. We are convinced that the way of Jesus is the most beautiful way to live. It is definitely not easy, but it certainly is good.  

The events of the first Easter (the death and resurrection of Jesus) have set us free from sin and death and brought about the beginning of God’s new creation right here in the middle of this one. When we embrace the saving love of God for ourselves and identify with Christ’s sacrificial death we begin to wake up to who we truly are and experience life in all of its fullness.  

But wait, there’s more—we have also been given the Holy Spirit, which is the unique abiding presence of God that makes the truth of the gospel real in our lives and empowers us to play a part in the healing and restoration of the world.  

Life is a gift

In the creation poem found at the beginning of the scriptures God uses a word over and over again to describe what is created—the word is good. In the original language of the scriptures the word for good isn't referring to creation’s usefulness or moral quality—this word is referring to how jaw-droppingly beautiful it all is. We like to think it’s God saying, “Wow!”  

We are convinced that life is best lived with a sprit of wonder and a practice of gratitude. At the same time how we treat the gift says an awful lot about our heart towards the Giver. A proper response to this big fat gift that we call our lives is a commitment to stewardship and generosity.   

Everyone belongs 

We live in a world that loves to draw lines and pick sides. We aren’t a big fan of all that because one of the things we have recognized, in both the scriptures and in our own experience is that God’s grace loves to jump over all of our lines and extend itself to the people we least expect it to. Sin separates—Jesus reconciles. In light of this we are convinced that one of the best ways we can witness to the Gospel is to be a place where everyone—EVERYONE belongs.  

*In regards to the issue of human sexuality, we recognize that in our day and age this conversation is a complicated one. We want to be a community where we are free to disagree on the specifics, but where we all agree that everyone is FULLY invited to the table.  

Justice matters   

We believe that when God called the world good, God meant it and so we believe that this world and the people in it are worth fighting for. The hope we have in Jesus is not to escape this world and leave it behind, but to be a part of seeing it set it