Jesus Alone

The countercultural way of following Jesus

I pastor a Bible teaching Church that seeks to equip people to be loving, free, mature, Christ honoring, mission-minded, culturally equipped disciples who serve one another and our community, especially those at the margins.

In our call to serve, we have a primary focus at this season to be on the frontlines of the battle with addiction and its many corrosive and catastrophic consequences.

I pastor people, some are addicts, most are not. We are not a ‘sober’ church in the sense that we seek to be a recovery-centered, addiction-focused church, we are a Jesus following Church.

In that effort we do our best to teach people to follow Jesus, be led by the Spirit and the Word, live in grace-based, loving obedience and practice sacrificial service with a wise as serpents but gentle as doves ethos.

We believe that being a ‘stumbling block’ or ‘unwise’ is to be fundamentally out of alignment with the person, teaching and ministry example of Jesus as revealed and taught in the Bible. He is our way, truth and life. Having a Christ-centered vision and lens as disciples helps us navigate the challenging issues of our day which are always shifting, emerging and deconstructing.

The only true stability is having a life built on the foundation of Jesus, not religion, moralism, philosophy, materialism, politics, cultural, racial or sexual identities or legalism.

In light of this, we aim to equip people and model lives that major on the primaries of the faith and not on the secondaries and thirds. Keep the main thing, the main thing…Jesus, being like Him and sharing Him with others.

This allows for a lot of personal freedom and differences in our fellowship life together. We are not seeking to conform people to becoming certain types of Christians, but to be Christ-like in the way He made us. This means our Church does and will have a lot of diversity along many lines.

This is challenging for many who want everything to be black and white, good and bad and for someone to tell them what to think, instead of teaching them how to think. There is a type of freedom in strict fundamentalism, but it isn’t the healthy, spiritual, Jesus-embodied, sin-liberating freedom of the New Testament.

We understand that the type of discipleship modeled by Jesus isn’t considered ‘wise’ by many in church and leadership circles today:

-He had a questionable reputation surrounding his mother’s pregnancy story. (Matt 1:18)

-He was raised across the tracks in a working poor family. (John 1:46)

-He had a wild, hippy cousin who lived off grid, made his own clothes and followed a strange bro-science diet. (John 3:1-6)

-His first sermon didn’t go over well in his home church and ended with the congregation trying to throw him off a cliff. (Luke 4:28-30)

-His first miracle was to provide barrels of the best wine ever made at a wedding that had already run out (120–180 gallons: roughly 500–900 bottles). (John 2:1-1)

-He picked a motley crew of disciples from all kinds of questionable margins: cussing sailors, tax swindlers, hot headed political types who were part of a radical political group dedicated to overthrowing Roman rule in Judea. (Matt. 10:2-4)

-He attracted a lot of women who started following him everywhere and giving him lots of money. (Matthew 27:55-56)

-He would meet with questionable women alone (John 4:1–42)

-He put a thief in charge of the group finances even though he knew he was stealing money from them. (John 12:4–6)

-His first disciple to be sent to announce his resurrection was a woman who had been possessed by seven devils. (Mark 16:9-11)

This puts a different light on the whole “you should imitate me, just as I imitate Christ.” mantra doesn’t it? (1 Corinthians 11:1)

I share all of this because there’s so much pressure and expectation today to conform and perform in churches, for people and pastors. The standards assumed by many are often completely foreign to who Jesus was and how he modeled life.

People are flocking to more consolidated rule, power and control or fleeing to the far edges of lawlessness in religious and political spheres. The sacred and secular paternalism is infecting people minds and hearts, offering complete assurance of “peace and safety” (1 Thessalonians 5:3) but it’s actually leading them to destruction.

“I am shocked that you are turning away so soon from God, who called you to himself through the loving mercy of Christ. You are following a different way that pretends to be the Good News but is not the Good News at all. You are being fooled by those who deliberately twist the truth concerning Christ. Let God’s curse fall on anyone, including us or even an angel from heaven, who preaches a different kind of Good News than the one we preached to you. I say again what we have said before: If anyone preaches any other Good News than the one you welcomed, let that person be cursed. Obviously, I’m not trying to win the approval of people, but of God. If pleasing people were my goal, I would not be Christ’s servant.” -Galatians 1:6-10

This is the gospel that has radically transformed our lives and we considered safeguarding it to be profoundly important in these last days. Don’t settle for or support anything less than the gospel of…Jesus.

Jesus Saves.

Jesus is Lord.

Jesus is King.

(art: Christ Displaying His Wounds (c. 1630) by Giovanni Antonio Galli)