OUR COMMUNITY
Community is part of what makes a church a church. You can’t follow Jesus alone. Salvation is adoption into a new, and astonishingly diverse family. In a cultural moment focused on identity, we believe Peterson’s words that, “I can’t be myself by myself.” According to Jesus, our love for one another should be our distinguishing characteristic.
Biblical community is demanding, transforming, challenging and compelling. Community means knowing and being known. It means learning to love those we like and those we don’t like.
At HFL, we’re serious about community. We regularly eat together (1st Sunday of each month), worship together, serve together, care for others together, and seek to live in light of the staggering truth that all people matter because they bear God’s image. We are people in process, but we believe that becoming the community God calls us to be is one of our central tasks. This isn’t always pretty, but it’s worth it - we’re ordinary people following an extraordinary God together.
Community
Small Community and Large Community
We believe large gatherings (25+ people) and smaller groups both have a critical role to play in our life together. Some things best or only happen in each of those gathering sizes. We deliberately try to buck the trend of churches and Christians treating the large gathering as “church” and treating other gatherings as secondary.
Mission Work and Missionaries
We believe that God sends us into the world locally and cross-culturally to share and model the good news that God's kingdom has come through Jesus Christ.
To that end we are involved in work that promotes God's kingdom by sending people to work in various parts of the world, in partnership with local churches, indigenous believers and mission agencies. Rather than spread our resources thinly in an attempt to do a little bit everywhere, we have chosen to focus on three countries where we attempt to participate in a significant way as servants of local believers. Our goal is to serve and support them through various partnerships as they seek to carry out the mandate of Jesus' good news.
Our current areas of involvement are in Thailand, Ukraine and Ghana. In each country our involvement is unique. In some cases, we assume the responsibility to support missionaries. In other cases, we work directly with national leaders, local leaders and/or local church participants. Our focus is not to build a name for our local church but to be involved as servants in what God is doing in these places. We have also sent, and will continue to send, some of our people to each of these places for short terms, so that they could offer practical help and encouragement.
In addition to these areas of involvement, we also support itinerant missionaries who offer teaching insight and disaster relief in various places around the globe. While our perspective is global, we seek to be involved locally in order to build long-term relationships. It is our conviction that the gospel is most effectively communicated and demonstrated across relational bridges.