Values of Little Flock Church
Our values are like the DNA of our lives, or that of our family, or of our spiritual home. Values determine how and what effort, time or resources we apply to church life. Values help define and differentiate a local church. DNA governs our identity biologically. Spiritual DNA governs church identity. DNA is in the shape of a double helix – it is in essence binary opposite strands twisting in helix formation. All truth is in tension – grace with truth, the word with the Spirit. Values are the spiritual genes you inherit from the Lord and through spiritual fathers and mothers.
1. Cultivating One Desire
Cultivating singular desire for Jesus Christ in his followers. To be radically Christ centred – Jesus is doctrinally, ecclesiological, practically, prophetically, organisationally, the centre of church mission, practice, and purpose. The Holy Spirit helps us fix our eyes on Jesus and reminds us of all the things He said.
2. Lovers of God
The end of discipleship is creating a culture of obedience, first to obey the greatest commandment of Jesus, the greatest of all commandments, to understand the absolute union of the Godhead in the shma (Mark 12:29-31) and to love the three personned Godhead from the revelation of that oneness with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.
3. Lovers of self and others
Love ourselves as Christ loved us. Value the imago dei in people. Love our fellow believers as ourselves. To proclaim the gospel to every creature.
4. Rest in the Finished Work
A finished work theology teaches that everything needed for salvation and spiritual life was fully accomplished by Christ through His death, burial and resurrection 2000 years ago. Believers are called to rest in this finished work and live from their received New Creation identity in Christ in which victory and freedom is provided by His triumph over sin and death. The focus is on the grace of God leading to the works of faith and the believer’s reliance on what Christ has already done rather than on their own efforts sourced in self will.
5. Community is in, through and for Christ, church is not a social gathering or social justice project
Church is family. Fathers and mothers disciple children in the faith, it is not a social club. “I have community with others, and I shall continue to have it only through Jesus Christ. The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us. We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, and for all eternity.
That dismisses once and for all every clamorous desire for something more. One who wants more than what Christ has established does not want Christian brotherhood. He is looking for some extraordinary social experience which he has not found elsewhere; he is bringing muddled and impure desires into Christian brotherhood. Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together
6. Priesthood of all believers
We believe in the priesthood of all believers and that ‘all get to play the game’ as John Wimber said. We believe in a liturgy of the Spirit, lead by the Spirit through the members of the body. We value 1 Cor 14:26 as not an exceptional picture of church functioning but as normative, where every and all members contribute to the vocal and spiritual ministry.
7. Slow Church, Prophetic Church, Countercultural Church
The church is not of this world, the otherness of the church is evidence of its divine calling. We value this separateness in holiness and consecration, perfect religion is not being spotted by the world.
One aspect we wish to be a salty counterculture force in the world, is we value a local church to be Sustainable, Local, Organic and Whole, witnessing to the excess of a world that treats busyness as a virtue and productivity as god. We value going lower, slower and simpler in conducting our lives before the unbeliever as our expression of love to God and as a counter cultural witness to a world drugged by the god’s of speed, haste and hurry. We are to be countercultural in our saltiness, not bland and tasteless to the world. We are to provoke the world to jealousy, not sure the dire stats of a world without hope.
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8. Church Membership
“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” 1 Cor 12:12
- Guests
- Regulars
- Members
The attention, spiritual resources, vulnerability, effort and time given to a specific group of church attenders we fellowship with informs the nature of the relationship and responsibility we have to them.
Guests, regulars, and members define the different type of attachment in a local church context. Guests are occasional visitors; they can be floating. Regulars come more often but are not attached. Members are functionally attached to a local church, like an arm or leg to a body.
To each of three types of church goer, different responsibilities for prayer, financial and other support is expected. Paul uses the term ‘members’ in (1 Cor 12”12 and Rom 12:5). You are part of the invisible universal church but also a part of a local visible church. A member enjoys the maximum benefits but also has the maximum responsibility.
9. Unity and maturity
Ephesians 4:13 – all equipping ministry by fivefold gifts is to two main ends, maturing the church to the fullness of the stature of Jesus and bringing an obedient church to the unity of the faith.
10. Doctrine
We accept Scripture as the final and ultimate authority in doctrine and also accept the Apostle, Nicene and Athanasian Creeds as orthodoxy.
11. Leadership
We value leadership as a functional gift. For those that lead more diligence is required. It is functional, not positional. Elders, deacons, and bishops all have a role in church government.
12. Fivefold Gifts
We value the enrichment that the fivefold gift ministers impart into the body. The gifts are last in the procession of Christ as His chief slaves.
13. Spiritual Disciplines
We value the role the 12 spiritual disciplines play in spiritual formation process.