Damascus Road Church, a Marysville, WA Church

core values

Under the shadow of the Gospel, our core values are the central and most essential qualities of our being. They embody who we are, representing timeless convictions that permeate everything we do as a church. They do not define the only important things, but those things of FIRST IMPORTANCE. These values guide our decision making as we take the Gospel into a culture, contextualizing to the culture in order to communicate, gather new believers into this new community called the church, and send them back into the culture in order to transform and heal through the message and the work of the Gospel.

truth:

We stand firmly on the truth of God's spoken Word. It is the Scriptures that reveal to us who God is, who we are, and how we find our way in a fallen world. We believe in the plain, clear, bold, and consistent lifting up of God's Word. The preaching, teaching, and decision-making should point to the Scripture as the source of all meaning and direction. The love of Scripture is further encouraged with verse-by-verse expository preaching of God's Word driven by theology. We believe in tackling difficult, controversial, or "offensive" passages unapologetically and with authority. We are not "seeker-sensitive", as theologically there are no seekers, but we believe the direct unadulterated proclamation of biblical truth is the most relevant way to reach the lost and equip the saints. Without question, the teaching and preaching must connect with today's reality, but this is not accomplished through compromising truth, cleverness of speech, or any other approach that seeks man's approval before God's. Everything should be driven by, steered toward, or otherwise point to the truth and the person of Jesus Christ as revealed in the Scriptures and our need for Him.

worship:

We desire to bring glory to God and His Kingdom through a lifestyle of worship. Our church aims to redeem worship from the limited definition of a personal preference in music style. We avoid worshipping worship by seeking to glorify God in every moment and through all aspects of our lives. We are creators not consumers. As possessors of the Imago Dei, God has empowered us with the ability to create. Since music naturally becomes a big part of our identity, we are committed to creating and playing music that glorifies God, preaches the gospel, and connects with culture. Because not everyone is a musician, however, we encourage individuals to worship and serve God creatively through their vocations and distinctive passions. True worship should involve all of who we are-our hearts, minds, bodies, marriages, finances, as well as our unique talents and giftedness. We must not go so far as mistakenly worshipping the creation but should encourage creative expressions to become another medium through which we communicate our love for Him.

mission:

This is not our mission; we joined the mission God began in the Garden of Eden. He pursues a loving and gracious relationship with the humanity whom he created and who rebelled against Him. He offers salvation to those who will repent and believe. God's mission comes to climax in the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who was SENT into the world to save sinners from Hell unto himself. Jesus SENDS the Holy Spirit to empower US as Jesus' people, who are SENT into the world to proclaim the good news that sinners can be forgiven and that lives can be transformed. Jesus has sent us to the lost. Evangelism, therefore, is not something we do it is something we are every day. "Reaching" the world means you cannot adopt a "come to us" mentality. We must enter, expeirence, and love a broken world while we communicate truth to them in an environment they identify with. These types of environments are naturally generated as we approach our community like missionaries, speaking in their own language and custom, inviting them to join our community just as they are--creating a place to belong before belief. We refuse to separate and protect ourselves from living culturally or confuse it with living worldly-which is disobedience to God. We do as Jesus did, incarnating into our world, living in it, redeeming it, and through it glorifying God. The church must habitually reform everything we do in order to avoid building a "church culture" that cannot genuinely connect with the people.

community:

We endeavor to model the community eternally existing within the triune God. We believe that God exists in a perfect community of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and that He created men and women not to live individually, but in community. No one wants to be alone. We believe we were built for community; we need people to share our hurts and our joys with. Kingdom community is not about programs; it is about people. It is about each individual fulfilling their God-ordained role as a man and a woman to serve one another to model His ideal Kingdom on earth. Our world often works against community because it is hard and uncomfortable to love anyone not like you. But that is what Jesus did without compromising the truth. True Kingdom community proclaims the truth of the gospel by how they love. The gospel says Jesus accepts us even though we're unlovable, dirty, and lost. We want our city to experience this kind of love and acceptance. We truly desire people to "come as they are", not so we can build a big church, but so that through genuine community, they will meet Jesus and find a family. In such a fragmented impersonal world, the church must be a place where people connect in the deepest way using their talents, blessings, gifts, and hearts in friendship, service, worship, prayer, caring, nurturing, & love.