Our foundational theology calls us to Engage God’s Mission.
God’s mission in the world is to reconcile all things to God’s self. It is to return us to one-ness with God and with one another. To engage God’s mission is to live into the invitation of baptism by joining God in that reconciling work, whether that be in our faith communities, in relationship with others, or in our neighborhoods.
One way of imagining this work is the Beloved Community.
Jesus taught about the kingdom of God: the prophets’ vision of shalom, where the powerful and the powerless can imagine and enact a just world together. In our time, prophetic voices such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others used the language of Beloved Community to describe the experience of God’s kingdom in our lives today: moments of reconciliation and joy that break in and rebuke our racial and social divisions. “Beloved Community” was new language in the 1960s for what Christianity has held for almost 2,000 years — the ever-inbreaking-but-as-yet-not-fully-realized Reign of God.
We need daily practices that help remind and center us, so we practice Living the Way of Love.
The Way of Love is a rule of life — a set of practices that we can engage in on a daily basis — meant to re-orient us towards God. As we are continually reminded to turn towards God, dwell in scripture and live a life of service, we are set along the track that leads us towards engaging God’s mission by opening our eyes to God in us, in others, and in the world, and that leads us towards creating beloved community by acting on the movements, call, and promptings of the Holy Spirit.