Life in the City: Truth as a Core Value

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Welcome to the life in the city podcast from Antioch Community Church in northeast Minneapolis where we explore what it looks like to be a loving family, inviting all people into the life, changing way of Jesus Christ.
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We’re glad you’re here.
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Hey, welcome back to the life in the city podcast.
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My name is Rachel Love.
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And I’m Coley Waataja.
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So if you have joined us for another episode, we are so thankful as we continue to figure this podcast life out.
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We’re glad to have you with us here at Antioch.
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If you’ve ever been to one of our services and you’re somebody who grabs the bullet and you might have seen on the back of our bulletins, we have 6 core values listed on the back of.
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Our bulletins and so.
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Coley and I thought it might be a good idea to kind of talk about what are those core values and why do we have them on the back of our bulletins and why do we care about these things?
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So we’re going to dive in today.
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What are core values?
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Yeah, let’s start there.
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Right, uhm yeah it’s funny.
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’cause core values?
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I mean every company has core values.
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Yeah, every big company at least and they can kind of kind of be like a buzzword.
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Or they might be things that are like on a.
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Poster, but.
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Aren’t really part of the culture, that kind of thing, but for us at Antioch.
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And for churches, I think.
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That that do this well.
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You really want your core values to be both.
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Descriptive of who you are as a church, family and a little aspirational like recognizing that you’re not going to get.
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You’re not perfect at all of these things.
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But one analogy that can be helpful is to imagine an iceberg, so you’ve probably heard before that you know you only see 10% of an iceberg above the water or something like that. There’s so much ice underneath the water that you just don’t get to see, and in a church.
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Rest in peace Titanic.
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But in a in a church, the part of the iceberg of the church that you see is the programming.
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It might be this what you see on a Sunday morning or what you see on we don’t have Wednesday nights, but you know, like the midweek programming or for us it might be community groups or missions.
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Things ministry things that we do in the city.
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The things that people typically shop for when they look at churches sometimes.
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Yeah yeah, like the stuff.
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Yeah, the stuff.
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That you see.
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But if done well and perfectly, those programs don’t just come out of nowhere.
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They’re not just floating on top of the surface of the water, they’re coming from somewhere.
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And so as you dig down, those programs are coming from a set of strategies.
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But those strategies are coming from our our goal to accomplish the mission.
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And the vision that we have.
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Well, that mission and vision comes from who we are, and that’s the core values.
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So at the bottom of the of the iceberg are the core values.
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I will say there’s there’s one deeper that you could go that this that core values are not.
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Core values are not the same as our statement of faith.
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Yeah, they’re not.
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You know, that’s why we don’t have a core value of the Bible exactly, or we don’t have a core value of the Holy Spirit.
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Those are stated in our statement of faith, which is we are part of the Evangelical Free Church, the FCA, and so all the FCA churches have the same statement of faith, but not all of the FCA.
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Churches are going to have the same core values.
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’cause it’s more like a personality and just this is unique to who we are in this time in this place.
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And it doesn’t mean that those other FCA churches may not see the benefit of those core values in the life of our church, but it may not reflect who they are as a body as well, because everybody is different, totally totally.
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The fact that we are in northeast Minneapolis, the fact that we are a younger church on, you know we’re not 150 years old.
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But all of these things that the general makeup of our people, like those, are what lead you to.
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Kind of defining who you are, and it’s good to describe and define those things.
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So let’s talk back about how they were defined because I know you were a part of the core team at Antioch to kind of help plant and start this church.
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So where did these core values come from?
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How did it get decided what core values we see within our body or want to have within our body?
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Yeah, it’s been a minute uhm. In 2008 we had our core, our core team, which was a group of people that just met to figure out everything.
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Uh, because you know when you start with nothing and you end up with a church, there’s a lot of questions that need to be asked in the process and and one of those things was.
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Core values so for.
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Gosh, at least a month, but I think it was longer than.
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That we sat in Indian Sara’s basement not like a month straight. Like a series of evenings.
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We sat in Indian saris basement and as we talked about core values.
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Uhm, we we we had this this system that Andy LED us through that was.
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Really helpful.
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We came each with our individual ideas of how we would describe antiok.
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What do we think is important to Antioch?
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I I don’t even think we were named Antioch at that point, but we just what’s this?
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This church plant church.
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Exactly exactly and for everything that we thought was important or that was unique to us.
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We wrote on post it notes.
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And then those post it notes got put up on their basement wall and they have.
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A long wall.
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So it was just covered, and so we all got to share all of these different things.
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There were like 12 or 15 of us.
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And so there were or maybe 100 post it notes up there, but you could start to see some themes of things that were similar or similarly worded or just straight up identical.
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And after kind of grouping things and and finding similarities and threads and you eventually just kind of prayerfully.
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Prioritize and pare down the list.
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Who are we?
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Who do we want to be?
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Yeah, search.
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That is growing together exactly.
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Yeah, and So what?
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You don’t want it to be as far as like the slightly aspirational.
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It’s it’s OK to recognize, hey, we’re not completely here yet, or we’re not, you know.
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Doing this perfectly, but you don’t want it to.
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Be so aspirational that it’s just not who you are.
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At all that it’s not achievable, or you know.
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Right like like?
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Well, even with the yeah know who you are and who you could be.
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Yes, right, with the help of the Holy Spirit, right?
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Right if.
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If I was making my own personal core values, my core value 1.
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Of my core values would not be a professional basketball player as much as I love basketball.
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Or did I guess I don’t have anything against it right now.
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I just mean like.
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I used to be into it.
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I’m never going to be a.
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Pro in a pro sports.
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League, so that’s not going to be a core value ’cause it’s just not how I’m.
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Wired and just.
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It’s not.
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I’m not that passionate.
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About it, but maybe you know active or activity play or something.
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OK.
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You know there might be something more.
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Uh, more applicable.
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So for us, UM.
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We ended up down with these with these six core values that we landed on.
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Yeah, and I mean.
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Six is is not a little.
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Yeah, but it is a a good amount of things to want to aspire achieve.
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See in life of our church so I’m.
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Is it OK that some may come a little more easily than others?
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Because obviously our church has changed over time.
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You know, in the past 14 years, it’s not just those same 15 people that gathered in Andy’s basement.
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Our church has changed dramatically and so is it.
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OK that maybe some of those values are a little easier and others maybe are a little more.
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Challenging to see in Lifebar church, right?
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Yeah, so well, let me read the six core values just for starters.
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It’s the first one is truth, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
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But then the others are pursuing God.
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Organic community, Creativity, holistic mission and intentional multiplication.
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And so I mean, even in that list.
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There are some that we when we chose those we had a certain idea of what they would look like as they matured for lack of a better.
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Term because we knew how they were being expressed at the time.
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So for instance, creativity.
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It’s not the same kind of biblical concept as some of the others, it’s it’s.
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It’s a less churchy word maybe.
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But at the time we had incredible musicians.
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On our team and we do now I’m not comparing.
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I just we had like semi professional musicians on our team and you know we hadn’t worked to find them.
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We just ended up with them.
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We had some very art oriented people come and and we thought, wow, like we could have an art ministry.
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We could have a music ministry we could have, you know, creative.
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Writing incorporated into our services like we and we did some of that.
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But as we know in Minneapolis, turnover is high and people change and and we do still have, we’ve still really enjoy our good music and we enjoy raising up musicians and.
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And other artists and things.
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But the way we express creativity now is slightly different in that we have a permanent space and we didn’t at the time we’ve been able to express creativity through like how we layout the building and how we decorate and and sometimes decorating gets a bad rap.
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Just ’cause it sounds froofy.
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But like I mean, what Rachel, you’re Rachel?
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What Christa Ricucci has done with decor in the building?
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It aids in our ministry.
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Oh my God.
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I mean it’s incredible.
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This is how she used her.
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She uses her skills and talents in a way that is so foreign to me.
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I have this little game I like to play when Krista submits a purchase order request for some of the things she’s going to use for decorations.
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I like to play what could?
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She possibly make out of this.
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’cause I think it was at Christmas time.
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She ordered coffee filters, little plastic straws and fishing wire and I had no idea what she was going to do.
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And then a week later I go into the auditorium and it looks.
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Beautiful yeah so thank you Krista for doing that.
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Yeah, we need to we.
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Need to have her on the design team.
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Sometime she’ll be, uh.
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But it would be great to have her come, but so, like yeah, decor and we still have artists and we still have musicians.
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But now we get to do it not just by internally, but like we’re part of.
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Art world yeah and we get to be a site for that and we get the community in through that.
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We also are creative in other ways like.
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Encouraging everyone to be creative in their own space. So it’s not just like artsy, quote, UN quote people. It’s how are you creatively using your business acumen or your just ability to work, or your flexibility is a stay at home parent, or.
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Some may argue that’s not as flexible, but you know what I mean?
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Like how how can you be creative in your everyday life for the sake of the gospel?
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Kind of using like innovation and creativity in your even in your mind and how you go about your daily work and how you steward your time and your talents and.
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Your efforts, right, right?
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So I’m I’m getting.
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I’m regressing into creativity.
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So they may not all be expressed in exactly the way that we anticipated they would be, but they have remained kind of true to who.
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We are well and that brings a follow-up question.
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You know there are some.
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That maybe are a little more easily seen on any given Sunday or throughout the life of our church.
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And I think you hit it at the beginning.
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There are some that maybe are a little more aspirational right in the fact that maybe we’re not seeing this in fruition right now, but we hope that God will continue to work to make this true of our church body.
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And how do we wrestle with the fact that some are a little more aspirational?
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Yeah, so there was a reason and I don’t remember every little conversation that we had.
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That many years ago, one of the things is that you kind of want them all to sound coherent together, you know, and so there was a.
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There was some discussion over the fact of how we should word the second one, which is pursuing God.
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Because it’s a participle.
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The ING or gerund, depending on how you want to think about it, and none of the others are, and so there’s kind of.
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A grammatical like wait what what?
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A little bit of a.
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Dissonance a little bit for those for people who think like that, but we we couldn’t get around the fact that like you can.
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Pursue God with the idea that you’ve arrived.
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Yeah, and so.
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Uhm, like we had we we just felt like we had to recognize that pursuing God is a lifelong pursuit and you never really arrive.
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You never finish it’s.
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We’re not just leveling up all the time kind of thing, yeah?
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But yeah, it’s it’s about.
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It’s about the journey and about continually moving closer to Jesus and becoming more like him over over time.
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So in that sense, that one is like eternally aspiration.
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Yeah, I mean it’s sanctification living out in our lives for sure.
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Exactly exactly.
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All right, well our core values you did read off the six before truth pursuing God, organic community, Creativity, holistic mission and intentional multiplication and so today we really want to focus in on our core value of truth.
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So I’m just going to read it.
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Yeah, awesome.
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We believe Jesus Christ is the supreme embodiment of.
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Truth he is the way, the truth and the life. All things find their ultimate meaning and purpose and him. We also believe the Bible is God’s written, authoritative and completely true revelation to his creation.
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We are passionate about being transformed by God.
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As we grow in love, zeal, knowledge and obedience to the truth he has revealed.
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Wow, that’s a.
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Lot, I think it’s great, so let’s kind of.
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Dive into that.
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What is truth?
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And I think the this is what people have been trying to figure out for millennia, right?
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But that first statement we believe Jesus Christ is the supreme embodiment of truth.
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How can you speak to to watch?
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Truth is cold?
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Yeah, just you know a quick light question.
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So at the bottom of each of each core value we have some some scripture references that that we were inspired by or think are a good a good summary of of each of these points, and so the the first one under truth.
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I want to read.
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I’m looking flipping into it here is.
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John 14 six and I think this is such a good.
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Yes, it’s just a good summary. John 14-6.
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Well, I’ll start in verse 5, Thomas, one of the disciples, also known as doubting Thomas in some contexts, which isn’t fair ’cause he only doubted because he hadn’t seen Jesus in person after the resurrection, which you and I haven’t either.
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But he struggled until he saw him in person.
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But that’s this is that’s digression.
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This is all before.
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John 14-5 Thomas said to Jesus, Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?
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Jesus said to him, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
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No one comes to the father except through me.
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And it’s it’s one of the places where Jesus is just so direct of saying guys it’s not about this thing outside like this.
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This other idea.
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It’s about me.
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It’s about Jesus.
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In our culture, and even before modern Western culture.
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There’s lots of ways to determine truth.
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And right now it’s very in vogue to say my truth.
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Yeah, that phrase.
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You can believe your truth.
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I believe mine and we can just sit in that together kind of thing, yeah.
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Riot which which logically is self defeating.
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You can’t, you can’t have two competing truths and both function and I think we’re actually starting to see that in our society, which.
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Kind of.
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Interesting that even in secular society they’re realizing OK, yeah, I know this doesn’t actually work.
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Because if you and I have two different definitions of truth.
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That are contradictory.
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They can’t both be true.
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Yeah, and I think in like the worldview of secular humanism that is so prevalent in our society, there is no absolute truth.
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But that’s one thing that the Bible actually contradicts.
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To learn that there is absolute truth, and that’s found in the person of Jesus Christ.
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Yeah, and that’s the big thing.
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That’s why we started this this wording with we believe Jesus Christ is the supreme embodiment of truth because it’s not just a set of tenants that we.
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Firm, it’s not just a series of things we believe are true.
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It’s in Jesus.
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Jesus is truth.
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And ultimately, he is where we find our meaning and purpose and it’s salvation.
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And we as a church like we’re part of a body, and Christ is the head of that body, right?
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And so he is.
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A part of our church.
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And so if this is what we value, we’re valuing what should be the at the core and central part.
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Of who we are.
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And I think you know, in John 17, when Jesus is in the garden the night before, he is to be crucified and he’s praying to the father.
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And one of the things that he asks the father is please sanctify them, he’s talking about his disciples, his church, sanctify them.
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In truth, you are word is truth and we know Christ is the incarnated word right?
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And so he’s saying this is how they’re going to be unified together as a body is by being sanctified.
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In truth, and so I, I don’t think it’s yeah like you said like this.
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Just like creed that we put down of like yes, we believe in truth.
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I think it has to be central part of who we are and what we value.
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Yeah, and the reason we started with it is because even 15 years ago or whatever was, we knew that you cannot assume.
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That this is assumed.
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Even unfortunately, even in groups of people that call themselves a church or a Christian Church, you can’t assume that that we believe that Jesus Christ is who he says he was or is who he says he is.
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We we felt like we had to say it right off the top like Nope, this is where we stand.
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This is what we stand on.
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And then everything kind of comes from that.
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Yeah, and I think you know, throughout the millennia there have been, there’s been a lot of ink spilled about what truth is and how we seek it and why we seek it.
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So us even living in this modern context in Minneapolis as a church, why is it important for us to seek truth to seek to know who Jesus is?
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Yeah, uhm, you know.
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Similarly, choose to what I said a second ago about it not being just a series of central tenants.
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You know these items that are true like 2 + 2 is 4 or something, but because truth is in the person of Jesus, we are also we are being transformed by him or we we ought to be allowing him to transform us.
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And to make him make us more like himself.
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And so, as far as why, like in John Chapter 8, Jesus says if you abide in my word and you are my disciples, indeed you shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
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He could have.
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In theory he could have just said you will if you abide in my word, you will know the truth.
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And won’t that be great?
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You’ll know the truth.
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But like, but he continues on it has an effective purpose that isn’t just head knowledge.
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We can know the truth in Christ.
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And be made free by it.
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So that’s that’s one of the big reasons why.
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And that makes me think back to that original freedom in the garden, right?
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When Adam and Eve were created, they had this freedom to be in relationship and to know God.
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And they knew truth because they were walking daily in the garden with him.
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And that is so freeing.
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But because of sin, right?
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We’re chained and shackled by.
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By that as well, by our sin, nature, and so by knowing Christ, we’re kind of brought back to that original relationship with God and knowing him and knowing truth.
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Yeah, absolutely so.
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OK, how?
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How do we seek truth, right?
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’cause that’s really easy to be like.
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Yeah, we should know truth.
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We should know how it’s embodied by the person.
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Of Jesus, how we can see ourselves and God in light of that truth?
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So how do we actually seek truth on a day-to-day boots in the ground way?
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Yeah, there’s a.
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There’s a lot of.
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Ink has been spilled about who Jesus is.
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But ultimately we have the Bible that we trust and and and you know, if we were going through a statement of faith, we could talk about what the Bible is and how it came to be.
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And all of that.
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But we’re going.
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To spare that for now, but ultimately.
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Jesus has revealed himself through the written word in Scripture, and if we want to know Jesus, we need to read his word.
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We need to know the word and to submit.
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To it.
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We’ve also been designed to live in community.
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You know it’s very rare that throughout history that people would read the Bible just alone by themselves.
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Yeah, it’s actually a more modern or or just like a monastic practice, but after the Gutenberg press was invented, you know the written copies of of the Bible.
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Became much more available and that became more accessible, which praise God for that yeah, but there’s something that I think it’s easy to forget how important it is to do in community.
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When we talked about this last time when we talked about sermons and listening to sermons.
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Together is very different than just listening to like a podcast or a live stream.
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There’s that accountability piece that when we are together we can be representatives of the truth to one another and we do that through song in worship.
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Sometimes too, we sing the truth about who God is, and we remind each other.
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Of that as well.
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Totally, and I mean the beautiful thing about truth is that it’s very logical, yeah?
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Innocent, I mean sometimes it doesn’t feel.
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All that logical.
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If if the Lord’s asking you to do something and with great faith, you know, but our experiences.
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To an extent can be trusted when when they are submitted to the authority of God and and evaluated through the lens of Christ.
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Yeah, that’s very different than saying, oh, that’s your truth.
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That’s my truth.
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Or that’s your experience.
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My experience I.
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I do like that you said when it’s submitted to the authority of God or the Bible or the body of Christ.
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Yeah, it’s important.
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I mean, we experience the Holy Spirit in our lives, right?
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And that reveals more of who God is and so I don’t think we should negate experience.
00:23:08
However, we need to put that experience in the perspective of who God says he is in the Bible through the person of Christ and within the body as well.
00:23:17
Yeah, so for example like.
00:23:19
If all I had to tell you was, you know if someone asked me how do you know Jesus is who he says he is?
00:23:24
And all I had was well, I have experienced his work in my life.
00:23:31
And I have examples for that that might be of some value, but when?
00:23:39
Well, if I if.
00:23:40
I only have well, this is what the Bible says, so believe it or or don’t.
00:23:45
Well, that can be a little sterile too, but together the Bible is God’s inspired word, but I am also empowered by the Holy Spirit and Christ is living in me.
00:23:57
And so through my life, ideally I should be living out the truth and exemplifying the truth in my life that is.
00:24:05
Is first attested to in the word, but then also confirmed as I live my life.
00:24:11
And so I can also share my own stories with skeptics or people that are asking.
00:24:15
That it’s not just while Jesus says I am the way the truth in life let me show you how he has been.
00:24:21
The way the truth and the life for me, and there’s no other.
00:24:25
Possible way that these things could have happened?
00:24:27
Without him and I love that you mentioned living it out because the identity of who we are.
00:24:32
We’re image bearers of Christ, so we need to live out that image bearer nest that we have.
00:24:33
Right?
00:24:38
So if Christ is the truth, we should be representatives of that truth and how we live in the world as well, yeah.
00:24:45
Well, thank you so much, Coley, I feel like this has been really helpful, especially you being like an antiok like Core Team member giving us a little back on an insight on how these core values came to be, and it’s been really fun to dive into this first one with you.
00:24:58
Yeah, I had to pull some cobwebs out to remember what 15 years ago, but no, that’s fun.
00:25:02
Yeah, so we hope to do more of these in the future.
00:25:05
We’ve got five more to crush.
00:25:07
But if you’re listening and if you have any questions about our core values, any specifics about them, feel free to reach out to us.
00:25:15
You can hit us up on Instagram through a direct message there or e-mail us at podcast@antiochcommunity.org.
00:25:23
Awesome, we’ll see you guys next time.
00:25:24
See ya.
00:25:28
This has been the life in the city podcast brought to you by Antioch Community Church in northeast Minneapolis. Join our worship service at 10:00 AM on Sundays in the Waterbury Building or contact us at podcast@antiochcommunity.org. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.