About us

At Community of Hope, we seek to connect people to loving communities that share life together and through which we grow more deeply into the real and tangible hope that Jesus offers us.

We believe strongly that hope is not merely a concept, that it goes beyond mere optimism. Giving hope takes action. We believe that God asks us to be hope.

Our Goals

We have three primary goals, which are driven by Micah 6:8.

And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

act justly

To act justly means that we reach out to those around us, standing up for the oppressed, providing for those in need, and bringing God's goodness into people's lives and into the situations around them.

love mercy

We love mercy by reaching in toward others inside our church family to foster close-knit communities that share the joys and struggles of life together. We want to create places where people can belong and be loved with all of their strengths and flaws.

walk humbly

with God

Finally, and most importantly, we reach up to the God who came down to us. We seek to be transformed by Jesus and to become more like Him, and to experience the deep joy and peace that comes from knowing and being known by Him.

What We Believe

Jesus

At the center of human history and of the church is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. He was and is both 100% human and 100% God, and is the clearest and fullest revelation to humanity of who God is. He lived the perfect, sinless life that we cannot live. He surrendered Himself to death by being executed on a cross and physically, literally came back to life three days later. By this He defeated sin and death for those who place their faith in Him.

Before ascending back to His Father, He commanded His followers to live as He lived, to carry the good news of His defeat of sin and death into all of the world, and to teach others to live as He did.

Someday He will return to fully bring His full blessings and final justice to the world.

Humanity and Creation

Humanity was created for immortality and for living in a joyful and perfect relationship with God, with each other and with the rest of creation. However, we rebelled against God, and have become severed from Him and from true life. Creation still displays the wonder of God and humans are still made in God's image, but everything is flawed and broken, breaking down, headed for death. There is nothing we can do about this on our own.

Salvation

Not only is every human flawed and broken, we are all under God's just judgment because we have rejected His infinite goodness and perfect love toward us. The cost of violating infinite perfection is itself infinite, which means that the only options are that finite beings like us can pay the cost for all of eternity or an infinite being can pay the cost once.

That is what Jesus did for us through His death and resurrection. It is only by placing our faith in Jesus that we can be saved from death and judgment and be restored, made new, filled again with the unending and overflowing life intended for us, and brought back into a perfect and joyful relationship with God. We do not earn this by being good, performing religious rituals or through any of our actions. It is a free gift that comes from God's unfathomable love and mercy, given to those who place their trust in Jesus.

The Bible

The Bible is God's written revelation to humanity of who He is, who we are, and of His purposes and work in human history. It is a collection of many different genres of literature, written over a span of many centuries by many different human authors, each writing under the sovereign guidance of God. Everything that it tells us is true. Because it is true and because it is from God, our goal as we read it is to avoid reinterpreting it in order to validate our own ideas about reality, but to let it reshape us and our views of reality, of God and of ourselves.

This is not an easy task. The Bible is not a simplistic book. While some of it is straightforward and easy to grasp on the surface, all of it invites us to dig deeply, to think deeply, and to seek God's help in understanding it and applying it. As we do this, God works through His word to reshape us inwardly and outwardly.

Discipleship

To be a "disciple" is to be a follower of someone, to learn from them and seek to live as they live. We are disciples of Jesus. This means that not only do we want to learn about Him, we also want to live like Him in everything we do. To be a Christian is not just to agree that Jesus said good things but to let Him truly be our authority and our example. Discipleship-becoming like Jesus-is a lifelong process that happens through prayer, studying God's word, serving others and seeking God both individually and in community with others.

Before Jesus ascended, His final words in Matthew 28 are a command to go and make disciples of all people, teaching them to follow and be like Him. This command is not just for a select few or for "professional" Christians who work at a church. All followers of Jesus in every setting are called to be obedient to this command. Each of us has a role to play in helping others follow Jesus.

The Church

The Church is the community of people who formed as a result of the transforming power of the Holy Spirit in the wake of Jesus' death and resurrection. Transformed people resulted in a transformed community of radical love and selflessness, and of radical devotion to living for God's purpose. The Church is referred to in the Bible as "The body of Christ." In other words, Jesus is present within the Church. This means that just as Jesus brought His truth and His blessings to people 2,000 years ago, so He continues to do so through the Church today.