MCC's Core Value - Community
Offering a safe and open community for people to worship, learn, and grow in their faith is our deep desire. We are committed to equipping ourselves and each other to do the work that God has called us to do in the world.
"Community" is something God values. For this reason, it is one of our Core Values. It is so important and central to us that it is part of our official name: Metropolitan COMMUNITY Churches. At Creation, in the beginning of the Bible's recorded stories, the Creator said, "It is not good for the human I have made to be alone." So God made another human as a companion for the first, then the Creator allowed for human children, thus making the family our first experience of "community." (Genesis chapter 2)
When Jesus came into the world, he lived and grew-up in community with his very large extended family. When he left home as a young adult, he gathered a small company of friends around himself and traveled with them as his new family (the disciples). Jesus also acknowledged a much larger group of people, who listened to him and believed, as his mother and sisters and brothers -- his family or his "beloved community." (Luke 8:19-21)
Following this example of Jesus, his earliest followers and believers continued the practice or habit of regularly meeting together to share food and information. They created a common life together (after Jesus was gone) of remembering, celebrating, and passing on all the things they valued about the One they were following and whose life they immulated. Thus in the Epistle to the Hebrews, we are admonished to "not forsake the assembling together of ourselves" so that we can "encourage and stimulate one another to love and good deeds." (Hebrews 10:23-24)
And so, for us, when the Rev. Elder Troy D. Perry founded and began to organize this part of the Family of God, he knew and fully understood right away that he needed to encourage us, as LGBTQI+ people, to be "community" first and foremost, on every level -- as locally gathered worshiping bodies; as groups of churches close enough to visit and support one another; then finally, we were called to assemble ourselves together as a world-wide/Universal body of believers -- always for the same common purposes: "To worship, learn, and grow together”; "To equip ourselves and each other" for the work of justice in the world; and To be God's Compassionate Presence to everyone we meet.
The call to "be Community" and to "live in community" is a tall order. Even the Kwanzaa Principles, brought into MCC by our African-American siblings, require that we be about the business of building and sustaining Community (with unity, shared values, and the common good at the core). As we grow and change from a US-Centric to a more Global-Centric Community, may we strive for greater equity in matters of gender, race, color, culture, ability, gender identity, sexual orientation, and economic status. We must also grow to value every person at the Margins of all societies, as much as we value that which is the dominant group in our setting. Only as we seek to balance these things can we be more fully the "Beloved Community" Jesus envisioned.
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