Our Mission, Vision, & Values

Our Mission (What we do)

Christ Church exists to make, mature and multiply disciples of Jesus Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, for the glory of God.

We make disciples through sharing the good news of Jesus with our words and living out the implications of the good news of Jesus in our lives.

We mature disciples through growing in our understanding and application of the good news of Jesus to our lives.

We multiply disciples through sending out new church plants to reach new neighborhoods in Philadelphia and throughout the world.

Our Vision (How we do it)

We pursue our mission together by having a vision to do three simple things:
Love Christ
We want to be a community that is most excited about one thing: the gospel of Jesus Christ. We believe that loving Christ is to be pursued in every facet of our lives—with our time, work, money, and more—as we consider the all-encompassing implications of the gospel. Corporately we nurture this love for Christ by gathering as a church to worship Jesus by remembering the gospel through preaching, teaching, singing, praying and celebrating the sacraments of baptism and communion (1 Corinthians 10:31, Psalm 145:1-21, Isaiah 43:6-7, Colossians 3:1-17). Loving Christ is a triune act, because in Christ, God the Father is fully revealed (John 14:9) and the Holy Spirit is the revealer (John 14:26). Our desire is that the Holy Spirit of God would so fill us with love for the Son of God, that the Father God would be glorified in our hearts and through our lives.
Love Each Other
Truly loving each other is a radical call amid a church culture of mere Sunday morning attendance and casual involvement. It involves mutual care, consistency and authenticity as we seek to worship the person of Christ and encourage the work of Christ in our lives. Though each Christian has a personal relationship with God, we believe the Bible teaches that our relationship with God is meant to be fleshed out in community. The Bible calls us members of the body (1 Corinthians 12:12-31) with the expectation that we contribute to the body for the glory of God and the good of His people, serving each other with words and actions. (Acts 2:42-47, Hebrews 3:12-13, 1 Corinthians 12:12-31).
Love Our City
Loving Christ and loving each other leads us to reach out in love to those around us. As people who live in Philly we want to be committed to loving this great city in word and deed. With our words we want to proclaim the Gospel, so that people might hear and put their faith in Jesus (Romans 10:13-15). With our deeds we want to display the radical love that God has for the city, so that people might see our good works and give glory to God (Matthew 5:16). By saying that we love the city, we aren’t trying to be exclusive. We believe that if we allow God’s love for the city to be our love for the city, then God can take those small steps of faithfulness and use them to turn us into a multiplying community that will spread beyond our city to wherever God leads.

Our Values (What we care about)

Like any family, there are certain things that we want to mark us as a church family. As we pursue our mission by living out our vision we want to have a church culture that cares about:
1. Gospel Centrality
We believe the good news of Jesus – that through faith in him our sinful lives are covered by his sinless life, that our judgment of death is covered by his death on the cross and that we are raised to new life through the new resurrected life that Jesus now lives – is central to everything we are as individuals and as a church. We never move on from this gospel, but seek to continually move in to deeper understanding and experience of the gospel.
2. Community
The gospel creates a new community which brings together diverse people to live in unity as we pursue Jesus and His mission. This community takes place through local churches where deep relationships are pursued. For us, church is not a building or a service time, but who we are as a community on mission together.
3. Mission
We believe Jesus has sent the church into the world for the mission of making, maturing and multiplying his disciples to the ends of the earth until He returns. Embracing our identity as sent by Jesus is essential to understanding that all of life (at work, at home, on our block, in our church community) is mission.
4. Serving
Just as Jesus sacrificially served us, so too we want to sacrificially serve those in our church, as well as our neighborhoods. We want to do this by using our gifts and resources for the needs of others, especially the poor and the powerless.
5. Diversity
One of the best expressions of the unique unity that the gospel of Jesus brings is through having diverse people embrace that gospel in community together. We are intentionally seeking to be a church that reflects the beautiful diversity in our neighborhood through multiple generations, socioeconomic statuses and ethnicities.
6. Equipping
We believe that each person has gifts given to them by God that will help build us together as a community on mission for Jesus. We are committed to helping people identify, develop and deploy their gifting for the good of the church and the glory of God.

7. Urban Imperative
We believe that if the church is going to have a strategic influence in our culture for the fame of Jesus, cities should be the focus of our missional efforts. For us, that means that while we want to be part of gospel expansion wherever possible, we are most committed to seeing that happen in our city, Philadelphia. We work out our love for our city by being committed to our local neighborhoods and we pray that God would use us to start other neighborhood churches throughout Philadelphia.

8. Next Generation
We are committed to passing down our mission, vision and values to the next generation by engaging children and youth with age specific teaching, modeling Christ centered lives and intentionally integrating them into the life of the church. You can find out more information about how we engage the next generation by clicking on Christ Church Kids or Christ Kids Youth Group.