About Us

Here are some foundational things for us as we begin:

We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work without expecting an immediate reward, to love without an instantaneous satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition.

-Thomas Merton

We don’t want to “make a splash” to start the church.

We want to do something lasting.

We believe the way you get somewhere is where you end up.

So we prefer what’s slow and real over anything manic or built on hype.

We want to be contemplative (meaning slow and mindful) without being navel-gazers.

The tendency is for groups attempting to do something new to become self-obsessed. The goal of this whole thing is not to build a name for Neighborhood Church. It’s to embody the message of Jesus in a way that changes the real world we live in.

We want to experience depth (in every way) without arrogance.

We don’t want to be snooty or high-brow. We just don’t want to skim the surface. We want people to experience a community of people committed to taking the message of Jesus seriously.

We don’t want to do anything in a frenzied state.

So we want stillness but not at the expense of justice.

We want to speak the right words at the right time.

So we seek to speak words born out of silence—so that when we speak it means something.

We recognize the deep need for deconstruction (of previously held beliefs) but never at the expense of building something new.

We want to see creativity come out of this community but for the sake of the world and not a single church.

The goal of the creativity that comes from the church is not to elevate our own brand. It’s because we believe that art can change the world and that’s kind of what we’re called to do.

We want to experience a new kind of weird—trading in the other kinds of weird we’ve experienced.

We want to be formed by ancient wisdom and be radically open to wild Spirit-newness.

We want to see tangible needs being met.

We want the blind to see.

We want the lonely put in family.

We want to see actual lives changed—not just the lives we present to each other in a Sunday service.

We want to be a people connected deeply with the earth.

We know that farming is no less spiritual than bible-study.

We know that what we do to the earth matters deeply to God.

We want to be a people of generosity in a culture dominated by scarcity.

We want to live out an embodied faith.

We want all people to be deeply loved