I’m blogging here a previous paper that I wrote for my churchhistory course at Bakke Graduate University. It was written for my first course, in May 2006. Note that the church I describe here is no longer gathering.

Part 4

Introducing Mt. Si Vineyard

Learning about and incorporating Benedictine spirituality in the church I pastor is the main goal of this project and paper. In order to describe our progress along this path, it seems wise to describe ourselves in order to have a context from which to apply Benedict’s work.

Among many other terms, we describe ourselves as a missional, incarnational community. We see ourselves as sent on the mission of God (missional), patterning our style upon the model of Jesus in which “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14, The Message). To us this means meeting our neighbors where they are – in location, in their faith journey and their cultural context (incarnational). We believe that spiritual formation happens best in community as we share different perspectives, understanding and approaches to Christian spirituality; all under a common vision and structure (community). We live in the suburbs of Seattle, and many of us commute to school or work. This flavors the frequency, type and content of our common life.

Mt. Si Vineyard’s Values

When our church went through what we call its 2.0 revision in the winter of 2005-6, our leaders took the opportunity to revisit our core values. Partly as a means of simplifying how we described them (our first revision had 12 core values), and partly as a recognition that there is an inherent difference between “what we hope we grow to be like” and “what we actually are like”, we formed a list of five values which flavor how our church operates. Briefly, they are: Grace (a recognition that we’re all called and formed by the grace of God, so we extend grace to others who aren’t yet perfect either); people of character (we recognize that to be a Christian means, literally, to be like Christ Jesus. We strive to have integrity and character, being authentic and transparent); servants(we follow Jesus’ example of washing feet and giving our entire lives; we serve in partnerships with local community agencies doing the things of God whether or not these agencies would label it as such); we recognize the Biblical texts as infallible though we are not (we submit ourselves to the teachings of Scripture and expect it to shape us and we recognize that our understanding of the text is imperfect and could benefit from attention to people with different perspectives in the Christian orthodox tradition); and we hungrily chase after God (we are a people who recognize faith as a journey with and to God. We realize we haven’t arrived yet, and so we are a Spirit-led people, constantly choosing to be formed and used for God’s work).

Revisiting these values, I now find particular fellowship with the Benedictine values of attentiveness to God and others, humility, and conversatio (conversion of character as a lifestyle).