Photo: Katharine Sherwin
Who We Are
A Jesus-centered community of people learning together to:
Discern and live the invitations of Christ through the witness of scripture, guidance of the spirit, and our relationships with one another.
Embrace our belovedness as children of God.
Participate in our personal and collective spiritual formation.
Cultivate a sense of belonging that values our differences.
Explore our questions with honesty, curiosity and grace.
Grow in love for our neighbors and join in the restorative work of God happening within and around us.
What We Believe
We are on a journey to discover what it means to be fully alive—to God, to our true selves, to each other and to the beauty and brokenness of our world.
At New Community Church, we want to walk with the committed and the curious, journeying together toward a deeper relationship with God. We want to offer the life of Christ in the beauty and brokenness of our world. And we want every person in our lives to experience the fullness of their humanity as they reflect the image of God in the world.
We recognize that each of us may be at different places on this journey with different personal beliefs and nonbeliefs. This Statement of Faith proclaims the beliefs and understanding of New Community Church and guides its teaching, ministries and activities.
Our Denomination
New Community Church is affiliated with the American Baptist Churches USA (ABCUSA), a mainline Christian denomination, in association with the Central Pacific Coast region.
With more than one million members and 5,000 congregations, ABCUSA is known for being the most diverse Christian denomination and the denomination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
ABCUSA’s congregationalist polity means that each local church is a distinct and autonomous congregation, responsible for articulating its own doctrine, style of worship and mission. (ABCUSA is not affiliated with the Southern Baptist Church.)
Photo: Elton Sherwin
Spiritual Formation
Spiritual formation is how our heart and our spirit are formed and how we begin to reflect Jesus’ heart and spirit in the process. We each have an inner life which has been shaped by our experiences, relationships, and practices, which then drives our outputs, our character, community, and compassion. No matter where we are on our spiritual journey, we are each transformed by the Spirit day by day when we are open to the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives.
At New Community Church, we believe that spiritual formation is the heart of the discipleship journey as Christ followers. We must play an active role in our own lifelong spiritual formation so that our formation moves us toward true Christ-likeness. Our transformation is helped through learning and knowledge, scripture, prayer and contemplation, wisdom from our community, and disciplines and practices. We invite you to intentionally participate in your spiritual formation and want to offer you resources and guidance along the way.
Baptism
We offer baptism to adults and teens who wish to take this important step in their faith journey. Baptism is a spiritual milestone and also part of the journey to becoming a steward (member) of New Community Church.
The immersion of a person into water symbolizes the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is an act of obedience (Matthew 28:18-20), but not a prerequisite for salvation (beginning a new life with Jesus that exists into eternity—Ephesians 2:8-9). Baptism is a voluntary act of identifying with Jesus and publicly declaring a decision to follow him. It should be done in a community of believers—the local church—to identify with that community both as a place of growth and as a place of service in the ministry of the church.
Because the symbolism of baptism requires a certain level of cognitive and developmental readiness, conversations with children about their own baptism at NCC generally begin as they approach middle school.
For younger children, NCC encourages parents to consider presenting their children for the ceremony of dedication, whereby God’s blessing is formally invoked upon the children, the parents publicly commit themselves to raise the children in accordance with the teachings of Scripture, and the community agrees to support the parents and the children in this decision.
Photo: Judy Adams
Photo: J Studios
Membership at New Community:
A Community of Stewards
A STEP OF COMMITMENT IN FAITH
Throughout scripture, we discover a holy calling for God’s people to become stewards of God’s active work in the world. Moses was a steward of the people, Solomon a steward of the temple, and the disciples stewards of the Good News.
“Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms. If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen.”