WHAT WE BELIEVE

The grace of God is His one-way, unconditional love for His people. This type of love is given freely and is not dependent on what you do or don’t do or how good or bad you can be. God gives His love freely based on who He is and not on what we may or may not have done. Sin still exists in our world. We still commit sinful acts as human beings. And left unchecked, sin can ruin your life and even drive you away from the Father. But sin no longer separates us from God because Jesus forgave the world of all sin. Our proper response to this grace must be to believe in Christ’s finished work, choose to accept His grace, and walk in deep, personal relationship with Him.

Hand-in-hand with grace is the New Covenant. Before Jesus’ death and resurrection, humanity lived under the Old Covenant where our acceptance by God was based on a works-righteousness system (how well can you keep his law or make amends for breaking it). However, Jesus ushered in the New Covenant where our acceptance is no longer based on if we sin or don’t sin but on the finished work of forgiveness that Jesus accomplished in His death on the cross. Under the Old Covenant, sin was the metric for our acceptance. Under the New Covenant, our acceptance is based on our abiding relationship with God.

Our world has given us so many different images of God that have distorted our understanding of Him. These images has been heavily influenced by entertainment, mythology, and conjecture. However, we believe that one of the primary reasons Jesus came and lived on earth was to reveal through His own life the true image of the Father. We teach that Jesus is perfect theology. If you want to know who God truly is, look at Jesus. Because of this truth, we also view the Bible through the lens of Jesus. In other words, the Old Testament looks forward to Jesus and the New Testament looks back to Jesus. We reject any portrayal of God that does not look like Jesus in His life, teaching, death, and resurrection.

The primary goal for any believer is to become a spiritually mature follower of Jesus. There is no greater goal than this. Becoming a disciple means that we commit to surrender our whole being to God for Him to mold us and use us however He may desire. We believe that discipleship happens best in one-on-one and small group settings where people can live life together and find and build deep, meaningful community with one another. However, we also value our large group gatherings and teaching as beneficial to a believer’s spiritual growth journey. It is our heart that every person who calls Genesis “home” would be deeply connected into a Life Group and be engaged in discipling others.

The sole mission of the Church is to make disciples of all nations. There is no greater call than this. The charge to disciple others is not just the call of the local church but of every believer. Even though we are all not called to be in full-time church ministry, we are all called to full-time ministry in our neighborhoods, workplaces, classrooms, and relationships. Discipleship is not about systems and processes. Discipleship is about investing our lives into others and giving them a seat at our table, displaying the life and love of Jesus, and leading them to their Heavenly Father who loves them. At Genesis, missions is done through both our foreign mission support, annual missions projects, local community partnerships, community outreaches, serving the needs of Bloomington, and through individual investment in our neighborhoods. Our goal is to build God’s kingdom, first in our neighborhoods, in Bloomington, and across the world.

We are committed to be a people of wild generosity because we believe that is our proper response to the wild generosity that God has shown to us. We are blessed by God in order to be a blessing to the world around us. The resources we have belong to God and we are the stewards of those resources. And we believe that the world will see God when disciples are generous and self-sacrificial in their finances, time, and gifts. To live a generous life requires that we learn how to manage and balance our finances, energy, and time well, like good stewards.

There is a lot of pain, injustice, and evil in the world. And we believe that Jesus is coming again to set all things right. How we view our role in this world until He comes matters. We do not believe in hiding away or bunkering down in the church to wait for a future day when we can escape this world, effectively condemning the world to hell. We believe that God has given His children the world as their inheritance and that we have a responsibility to build His kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven” to give to Jesus as our offering to Him. We choose to believe the world is getting better, not worse, when held against the witness of human history.

We are a church that believes in the use of the gifts of the Spirit as an essential part of the Christian life and our gatherings. We believe that these gifts have been given to us for the edification and encouragement of the local church. As such, we equip the Body in using these gifts in a balanced and healthy way—encouraging, accountable, humble, and in proper order.

Throughout the Bible and the history of the Church, spiritual disciplines have played an essential role in the discipleship process. These practices are tools that help us tap deeper into the life-giving water of the Holy Spirit so that when the chaos of life, tragedy, and persecution arrives on our doorstep, we are held in perfect peace by our deep, abiding relationship with the Lord. This relationship is cultivated in part through these spiritual disciplines. We believe that these practices are of great value to bringing mental, emotional, and spiritual health to the life of a believer.