Genesis Project Portland

Now that we have established who we are as the church, we come to part two of our question: What are we called to do? Throughout history the Church has been those who serve God and their communities humbly, and as we look back to the formation of the Church, we can look forward with hope in what we are to continue doing as God's people.

Over the last 2,000 years God has worked in and through His church, through the empowerment of His Spirit, but why? When we look at scripture we see that God has chosen us through adoption to glorify him through being models of his heaven on earth reality.

Another foundational truth of how God has ordered his creation is through story. On the journey toward Jesus we gain experience and understanding which make up our unique story. God uses that story as a part of His story, and we glorify him through sharing in that with one another.

In order to know where we are headed we have to first remember where we've been. In the first week of our series, Foundations, we dive into the good news of Jesus established his kingdom reign through his life, death, and resurrection. That set the course for a new world, through which we are now able to live differently as such.

Our friend Lauren Wilson is the executive director for Speak Out (wearespeakout.com) - a nonprofit organization that helps equip the local church around the arena of mental health. She walks through a difficult passage from Jesus in Matthew 6 about how he invites us into a new reality based on his kingdom and not on our anxieties and worry.

Our fourth and final core value is Sanctuary. We walk through what it means to carry the presence of God, while being a place of refuge for others.

As we continue walking through our core values as a church, we come to the value of what it means to show up and participate along the journey towards Jesus. Through the Spirit of Jesus, we become empowered to show up both for our church family, and to our greater community.

We are going through our core values at GP, and this week we are talking through the value of openness. Openness means that we are committed to maintaining a posture of vulnerability and humility, believing that the Holy Spirit uses our transparency with one another as an opportunity for growth.

In our journey with Jesus he opens us up to who he really is, and as we journey with one another we are able to understand better where we are coming from through vulnerability and transparency.

At Genesis Project we cultivate belonging in our shared journey towards the person of Jesus. We are taking 4 weeks to talk through our core values as a church. That is, the culture that shapes who we are as a group of people.

The first core value is the Spiritual Journey: We believe that over time, our faith is lived out relationally through a steady focus on Jesus and scripture. This can be broken up into three components–the journey is a process, the journey is side-by-side, and most importantly, the journey is towards Jesus.

As we conclude our series in Hebrews, we deal with two uncomfortable realities about following Jesus. The first is we are to be transformed from the inside-out by God's grace, and the way he softens our heart to receive his grace is through the second and perhaps more uncomfortable reality: through making us holy. These both serve us as followers of Jesus to reflect his blessing back up to him through our worship, and out to the rest of the world through our doing good and sharing with one another.