Relationship Not Religion!
We are passionately committed to help people discover the joy and freedom of relational Christianity. It is our firm conviction that Jesus’ death on the cross was to prepare for each of us a dwelling place in the heart of a loving Father and to free us to the kinds of relationships that can share his life with other believers and with the world.
You’ll understand our passion when you can figure out who in this cartoon needs the most help.
By relational Christianity we mean:
- A personal friendship with Father, Son, and Spirit. These are not just words to describe Christianity, but the very way he has called us to live.
- Healthy relationships with other believers. Many today think fellowship is nothing more than attending the same service together when it is meant to be so much more. We help traditional churches, home groups, and house churches to discover how to relate to one another in his love and allows the ministry of Jesus to flow between them.
- Friendships with people in the world, so that as God displays his character through us they might come to know the love of God for themselves.
For that to happen we spend a lot of time helping people understand the freedom that Father has given us through the work of his Son, Jesus. Only as we live in his love and freedom can we even begin to experience the power of life in Christ as he brought it to us. Specifically, we help people discover the freedom…
- To live in the love of an awesome Father, free to respond to him as he leads you, even if that means you make mistakes now and then.
- To walk without guilt or condemnation. Recognize that transformation is a life-long process that Jesus works in us by our security in his love, not something we do for him out of fear.
- To be real. To feel what you feel; to ask what you need to ask, to be wrong where you are wrong, and to extend that same freedom to others.
- To be liberated from accountability to human leaders who seek to take the place of Jesus in the church by telling others what they think he would have them do.
- To love other brothers and sisters freely, serving them the way Jesus leads you, and not trying to conform to their expectations of what a ‘good Christian’ should do for them.
- To live free of bitterness and hurt, even where religious institutions (and those who run them) have failed you. We’ve all got plenty wrong with us, so there can be no end to the generosity we can extend others in their weakness.
With this passion in mind, we look for any way Father asks us to…
- Go wherever he sends us to encourage people in the life of Jesus, whether it is to hungry hearts in a traditional congregation, a house church, or an informal gathering of believers who want to escape the rigors of religion for the joy and passion of a friendship with the Living God.
- Publish materials that will encourage people to the journey of knowing God better and trusting him more.
- Gather with those who are disillusioned with organized religion to help them heal from past abuse and to help them discover what life in Father’s family can be.
- Equip believers to let God transform them by his magnificent grace so that they truly reflect his image to the world around them.
- Help people who do not know him at all, to be captured by his love.
The free person in Christ and the rebellious will always look the same to those who labor under religious obligation because both ignore the conventions that manipulate men and women. But there is a major difference between the two. The rebel does it to serve himself and his passions, always harming others in the process and leaving a wake of anarchy behind him. The free person in Christ, however, does so because they no longer have a need to serve themselves. Having embraced God’s love at a far deeper level than any method of behavioral conformity will touch, they will guard that freedom even if it means others will misunderstand their pursuits. They reject the conventions of control not to please themselves, but Father Himself.
