the love of God is at work in the world
We gather to be shaped by the love of God, to become a committed community that deeply loves each other, and to dream up new ways of loving our neighbors in the city of Seattle. That is the bread and butter of Christianity which has been working for 2,000 years, and while there is nothing new about it, we believe a life lived in pursuit of those three goals is rich and magnetic. That’s what life is all about . . .
We are hunting for a fresh and free way to be a Church. We are creating a network of house Churches where food is shared, thoughts are discussed, people who are not Christian are welcomed, and plans are hatched to bring the love of God to every corner of Seattle.
guiding commitments
OPEN HOME:
The loneliness characterized as “the Seattle Freeze” is possibly the most deeply felt need in Seattle. We believe God wants to thaw that freeze. Early Christians didn’t invite people to a Church building, they invited them into their own homes. We want to be a community not an event. We are bringing Church back to the dinner table. A lot of people think of God as distant or even unreal. The reality is God is always near us, and as we meet God, His presence feels more familiar than our own home. Home is that place where everything feels right: we are known, we can rest, we can relax, we can belong. Jesus claimed that the eternal home of God is open to all of us. At Open Home Church we believe him, and in return the least we can do is open up our homes and our lives to our neighbors in Seattle.
Our Model is Our message
In 1964 Marshal Mcluhan said “The medium is the message”, which means that often the way we consume information can be more formative than the information itself. For example: the main way social media forms you isn’t from the content in any particular post you are reading, social media affects you more through other unintended results: you find yourself increasingly up late, comparing yourself to other people, locked in an echo chamber of news where you only hear from people who think like you. The posts never outright say this, they just do this to you in the background, and in ways we often don’t see coming. Often the format or “medium” becomes the message without us realizing it.
The same principle applies to Church. The format of our gatherings has its own formative affect on us. So what formative effect does it have on our spirituality to sit in silence as we idolize a speaker on a stage? Could there be unintended results?
At Open Home we believe our medium is faithful to our message.
We preach that God wants to make us a family. Families don’t interact with each other from a stage. They don’t sit in rows. At Open Home we sit in circles, we talk about what we are learning together, we eat together. These changes might seem small but we believe they embody the sense of family God is inviting us to embrace. After 8 years of trying Church this way, we believe it's a healthy structure for our most basic task as followers of Jesus: to love one another.
At Open Home our message is Jesus, and so our medium is the dinner table. We believe this is a healthy corrective to recent American Church structure which has lost the spaces where transformative friendships can happen, but even more importantly, that being a community like this is a radical and Jesus-embodying way to live in an age of social media, isolation, and individualism.
THE GOSPEL is our engine:
We want the love of God to be what drives us. Because God deeply loves us, Jesus died in our place, so that we can experience transformation, healing, and peace in every aspect of life, and live forever. That’s the gospel. Being in God's presence and love is the best thing life has to offer. It changes everything, from how we see ourselves, to what we want out of life. More than anything else, we want to wake up to God’s love and let it drive us through our little time here on earth.
Jesus is the center:
Jesus is the only special thing our Church has. You can find better food on yelp, you can find better dating prospects on bumble, you can find more similar people on meetup. The only special thing our Church has is the presence of the resurrected Jesus. Jesus is with us, healing us, loving us and guiding us. As a Church, we don’t need to pretend we have anything else to offer. We meet to make Jesus the center of our lives.
Our individualistic culture is discipling us. It is teaching us to become obsessed with ourselves. So many forces are encouraging the separation of people: the transience of city life, the push of consumerism, the way the power to swipe left through infinite potential mates has made us afraid of commitment. These trends come from and strengthen our culture’s obsession with individualism.
This world view generates boring, unfulfilling lives because individualism is fundamentally meaningless. Meaning always involves sacrificing your individual desires for a greater good. Jesus said you’ve got to die to live. The Cross shows the true path to the good life. Love is the good life. Our culture tells us to make ourselves the center, but we believe that true freedom happens when you orient your life around God and his vision for a world repaired by love. True freedom happens when you orient your life around community, around service, and around obedience to the voice of God.
We take communion every week to remind us that Jesus is the center of Open Home.
DISCIPLESHIP is the Method:
We believe Jesus’ last words before he left earth should be our first ambition: “to make disciples of all nations”. Discipleship is the main work a Church exists for. Discipleship happens through relationships. We have built our Church meetings around this goal, and so at Church we discuss the teaching, we apply it to our lives together, and we kick it and eat. When we grow we start new House Churches so that Church stays a space where you can know and be known.
JUSTICE:
It is ironic that commitment to justice has become a divisive topic in evangelical Christianity. God stands squarely on the side of the poor and oppressed. God stands on the side of the orphan, the widow, the homeless, the immigrant, and the racial outsider. At Open Home so do we. Supporting causes like the Black Lives Matter movement, or defending the rights of refugees from Honduras are the basic requirements of Biblical Christianity. We have no business declaring the love of God if our community isn’t demonstrating that love by getting to work. God’s vision for the world is to bring harmony and love at every level: personally, interpersonally, systemically, globally, even environmentally. When we join God’s work in the world we advocate for the poor, we pursue racial reconciliation, we care for the environment, and we work for the marginalized.
Serving our Community:
We love Seattle and aim to help Seattle flourish. At Open Home we hope to be a hub where people can cluster around redemptive endeavors. “Open Homies” (aka people who go to Open Home) are investing in relationships with sex workers on Aurora, starting an NGO for single moms, offering to go on walks around green lake with people who are new to Seattle through Airbnb experiences, making gift bags for people who are homeless, and investing in the spiritual lives of their friends and neighbors with small acts of love that can’t be measured or counted. We have a “man group” where dudes are getting uncommonly honest and growing together. We’ve got book clubs, brewery meet ups and hikes. This is the work of the body of Christ that is every bit as important as our Sunday gatherings. We hope these will just be early examples of many to come as Jesus powers us to make his beautiful, redemptive, fun, soul affirming community in Seattle.
