About Crestwood Vineyard
-
Crestwood Vineyard is a community of disciples seeking to actively engage in the ministry of Christ.
There are seven core values that shape everything we do here at Crestwood Vineyard:
1. The leadership and lordship of Jesus.
We value a healthy and reverent respect for the lordship of Christ in His church. Jesus is the head of His church, and we seek to follow His leadership. The church was made by Christ and for Christ, and all leadership within the church should flow from this value. Leadership is meant to draw people to God and enable them to live under His rule.
2. The empowerment and administration of the Holy Spirit
We value the work and presence of the Holy Spirit. We are, and must always be, people of His presence. Like Moses and Israel in the wilderness, the only thing that should distinguish us and make us any different from all other people on Earth is the evident presence of God with us (Ex 33:14–16). Biblically speaking, what makes church real church, as God intended church to be, is His manifest presence. We want to hear the voice of God and be led and empowered by His Holy Spirit.
3. The Bible
The Bible is God’s divinely inspired Word, and he reveals Himself to us through it. The purpose of Scripture is not that we should be knowledgeable in it, rather that we should practice it, encounter God in and through it, and be transformed by it.
4. Relationships
Relationships with others root us in reality, help define us, and create the body of believers we call the church. We are to nurture a culture of love, acceptance, and forgiveness that allows others to encounter Jesus through us. God’s commitment to us, displayed through Christ, is the basis for our relationships.
5. Individuals
We value all individuals and treat them with the grace and mercy God has shown us. Operating out of God’s grace from our own brokenness and need for him, we treat each person with dignity and respect as a unique individual, made in the image of God, respecting the unique place of each believer in the body of Christ. We especially seek to express this value by following Jesus’ example of loving the marginalized and showing compassion toward the oppressed, broken, divorced, orphans, and widows.
6. Wholeness
Healing and wholeness is God’s desire for everyone, whereas sickness, oppression, demonization, and death are all expressions of evil. Healing can be both an event and a process. Either expression demonstrates God’s compassion on victims of evil. Because healing can be a process, we embrace an environmental and holistic approach. Healing also involves an expectation for supernatural signs and wonders exercised by the gifts and power of the Holy Spirit. We demonstrate compassion on a pain-filled world by focusing both on evangelism and social justice.
7. The kingdom of God as the primary message of Jesus and the church
We are committed to the theology and practice of the kingdom of God, rooted in the vision of the Hebrew prophets and fulfilled in the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. We have been commissioned to proclaim the good news of the kingdom bearing witness to the already and not yet of the kingdom in words and deeds.
We view the kingdom of God as the overarching and integrating theme of the Bible. We are committed to the proclamation of the kingdom of God and to bearing witness to the deeds of the kingdom through healing (physical, emotional, and social), doing justice, and delivering those held captive by evil. Since the kingdom of God is the future reign of God breaking into the present through the life and ministry of Jesus, we are a forward-leaning church emphasizing the ever-reforming nature of the church engaging the world in love.
