Purpose & Process

We take seriously our understanding of and accomplishment of God’s purposes for Work of Christ Church (WoCC). These purposes aren’t a mystery--they’ve been spoken by God, lived out by Jesus, recorded in the Bible and are continually illuminated to believers by his Spirit. In short, God’s purposes flow from his character and nature. If you know God...you know his purposes.

As imperfect people, though, we have a tendency to wander off God’s purposes and onto ours. To take our eyes off of God and put them on ourselves. To worry more about what’s important to us than what’s important to God. That’s just being honest.

How, then, do we stay true to God’s purposes? At WoCC we’re keeping our eyes on Jesus Christ who the Bible claims is the exact imprint of his (God’s) nature (Hebrews 1:3). Because we believe that, we’ve committed ourselves and our church to the simple rule that we’ll only ever be or become that which rightly flows from the person and work of Jesus. In church language, that commitment reads like this:

WoCC will be a Christ-centered, emerging-missional church whose Christology (its sense of Jesus: the person and his work) will determine its missiology (its sense of purpose in the world) which will inform its ecclesiology (its sense of the nature, constitution and function of the church).

As a church, we’ve prayed that God would give us a unique calling consistent with the multi-faceted Jesus and appropriate for our community and cultural context...and he has. Our calling is all wrapped up in Jesus and described best by the following verses:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
(Philippians 2:5-11)

WoCC holds these verses as foundational and we will return to them often to measure how we are living out God’s unique purposes for our church.

In terms of how this looks lived out, please refer to the following image:

Illustrated here is the on-going Purpose & Process that our people will live out: RESPOND to Need as Christ, RECEIVE the Cross of Christ, REVEAL God’s Reign in Christ. These three steps comprise a repeatable process that allows people from anywhere along the spectrum of Christ-following to engage and move closer to Jesus.

We must ensure these steps are always in alignment with God’s mission in the world--that is, God reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them (2 Corinthians 5:19). WoCC will actively resist involvement in any activity, program, or priority that is not clearly aligned with God’s working in the world through Christ. Even if the endeavor is a good thing, WoCC will forgo participation.

This is us being Christ-centered.

Far from a culturally-detached church program, WoCC’s Purpose & Process will always be crafted for maximum effectiveness with the people, lifestyles, norms and traditions prevalent within our host community. This is called contextualization and this is a tool that WoCC will employ frequently.

With contextualization, the standing rule is that the message (the gospel) must never change, but that the container that the message is delivered in must always change based on the host community. WoCC will contextualize the gospel and will teach its people to understand the culture and become effective at representing Jesus within it.

To cultivate a Christ-centered and contextualized approach to our Purpose & Process, the people of WoCC are taught, equipped and encouraged to be missionaries to our culture...to our community. This requires a radical rethinking of “church” and what it means to be part of a church. WoCC is working against the prevailing church model that envisions churches as vendors of religious goods and services (Guder) and sees members as consumers. Instead, the people of WoCC will be unified by God’s missionary calling on their lives and they will look to WoCC to equip and support their accomplishment of that mission.

At WoCC, we believe that God’s mission has a church...not the other way around. (Hirsch)

This belief drives WoCC’s nature, constitution and function; thus producing a church focused on equipping and supporting people (ecclesiology) who are pursuing a unique missionary calling (missiology) that is rooted in the person and work of Jesus Christ (Christology).

For more details concerning WoCC’s Purpose & Process, please see below: