Foundations

Our Mission

We exist to make disciples who glorify God in all of life.

Our Vision

All of Christ for all of life in all of the Chippewa Valley.

Our Core Commitments 

1. Teach sound doctrine.

We preach expositionally (Light) and applicationally (Heat). We do not proclaim a novel message. We are not merely story-tellers. We are messengers, ambassadors, and priests who proclaim God’s message of salvation. Therefore, in our preaching, our aim is to bring God’s whole message to light by preaching entire books of the Bible in a way that displays their intended meaning. However, this is not an academic exercise. We preach to the heart and apply God’s word so that the saints are equipped to delight in Christ and obey all of his commands in all of life.

2. Proclaim the gospel.

We joyfully proclaim the good news that Jesus Christ, the God-man, was delivered up to be crucified, killed, and buried for our sins, and raised from the dead for our justification! God will save all who turn from their sins and trust in Christ.

3. Worship God together in spirit and truth.

Every Lord’s Day, God gathers his people to worship him together, as one body. In our worship, we offer ourselves as spiritual sacrifices, pleasing to the Lord. But at the same time, God needs nothing from his people. He is already completely full! Therefore, it is our joy to give God our praise and to receive from his fullness grace upon grace. That is, the weekly call to the saints is to come to the fountain of living waters—to come, buy, and eat and to delight ourselves in the riches of God’s table. This is the “market day of our souls”. We come in hungry, and we leave full, with spiritual food for the week stored up in the pantry.

But not only does God fill us up in worship, he also shapes us. Week by week, the church rehearses and proclaims the new covenant by faith. In this way, we learn—in heart, mind, and body—how to praise God, how to confess, how to receive his forgiveness by faith, how to pray, how to read God’s word and apply it to all of life, how to love one another, how to stand before God in reverence and awe, how to live holy lives. The Lord’s Day worship service is the key moment each week when the grace of God trains us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age as we wait for our blessed hope (Titus 2:11–13). Of course, this training continues throughout the rest of the week. But our Lord Jesus has set aside each Sunday for his people to gather, to glorify God, to receive from his bounty, and to be trained by his grace.

4. Pursue holiness.

God calls us to be holy. We don’t earn God’s favor by obeying him, but we do please God when we trust and obey him—cheerfully, humbly, wholeheartedly, dependently, prayerfully. We strive to practice the “one another” commands of Scripture with love flowing from pure hearts.

5. Love God’s design for men, women, and families.

We don’t merely affirm God’s good design for men and women in the home, church, and society. We love it. We believe that this good design is summed up well in the phrase biblical patriarchy. Patriarchy means “father rule”. We gladly believe and teach that God has embedded hierarchy and complementarity into the home, church, and society and that both men and women flourish when they embrace God’s design. We want our families to be faithful and fruitful. In particular, while the family is deteriorating in our culture, we encourage husbands and fathers to faithfully shepherd their households, and we encourage fathers and mothers to bring up their children with a Christian enculturation. We believe that a thoroughly Christian education is a primary way to disciple children.

6. Be first in, last out, and laugh loudest.

We love Joe Rigney’s summary of King Loon’s godly kingship from The Horse and His Boy. We have no interest in jumping into needless controversies. We are eager to avoid cultivating a quarrelsome or pugnacious character in the church. And yet, we are also eager to bear the fruits of courage and joy that are rooted in the happy, overflowing, steadfast love of God. Therefore, wherever our flesh, the world, or the devil try to pressure us to be quiet or to look the other way so that the light of Christ does not expose the works of darkness, there we want to march ahead boldly, proclaiming the message and kingdom of Jesus, strengthened and gladdened by joy in our sovereign God. We aim to exhort one another with grace, patience, and boldness, keeping short accounts and loving one another through both encouragement and rebuke. We aim to preach the whole counsel of God, not shying away from biblical teaching that the world hates. We aim to evangelize our families and our neighbors boldly and in love. We aim to speak prophetically to our community and its leaders, calling them to acknowledge the living Christ as King and to govern justly, in a way that allows us to live peaceful and quiet lives, godly and dignified in every way (1 Tim 2:2).

7. Equip the saints for all of life.

Christ claims absolute dominion over all the earth, over every kingdom, over every rule and authority. Not only the church, but all things rest under the feet of the risen King Jesus, including institutions and governments and businesses and families. Therefore, we aim to train the saints to carry the ministry of reconciliation into all of life—to bring all of life into subjection to King Jesus, that he might be preeminent in all things. Practically, this means that we do not emphasize church programs, but rather focus our attention on the work of Word and Sacrament to equip the saints for their work in the rest of life. Because Christ is risen from the dead, we train the saints to the end that the Chippewa Valley will joyfully submit to the reign of Christ through Spirit-wrought faith and repentance.