This statement of faith is about the importance of living in community. While the Trinity is mysterious, think of the Trinity as our Heavenly Father living in community with Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit. While He walked the earth, Jesus lived in community with His disciples. To that end, SouthBrook seeks to make it easy for people to connect with others in community groups where life change is most likely to happen.

There are many facts that point to Jesus’ claim to divinity. One of the acid tests of a belief is its effectiveness. Does it work in practical daily life? Skeptics have tried to explain Christianity away as a delusion, a psychological quirk, but the bottom line is it works. The transforming power of the resurrected Christ has positively influenced people’s lives for centuries.

The Bible claims to be the inspired Word of God and there is compelling evidence to back up that claim. SouthBrook desires to communicate the Bible’s relevance to our everyday lives using transformational teaching. In other words, our goal is not to “feed” people, but to make them hungry to know more, because that’s the way Christ taught.

Authentic community with God, as well as with others, is what makes it possible to live like Jesus. The ability to live like Jesus happens when you engage with what we call the Five S’s: reading and applying Scripture, spending time in Solitude, finding Support in healthy relationships, giving your life in Service to God, and surrendering the Significant Events in your life to the direction of God.

“Heaven” and “hell” are really about God giving us in eternity what we desired on earth.

Jesus described heaven as a vast community of people who loved and served Christ on earth, forever released from the ravages of sin, with no more sorrow, death, disappointment, guilt or remorse.

Jesus also described hell. He said there would be isolation and separation, discomfort and extreme remorse.

SouthBrook’s mission is to connect people to Christ, not religion.

We want to help all people, whatever their background or experiences, whatever their race, religion, gender, sexuality or ethnicity, to connect to Christ and his community on earth. 

Jesus challenges us to reorient our “me–first” mindsets to a servant mindset. When we live with a servant’s mindset, when we make Jesus’ presence known in practical ways, the church becomes a powerful, unstoppable force for change in the local community and around the world.

God has been generous and gracious to us.  We are alive by grace. By faith in Jesus Christ, this grace is accessible to us every day. God’s grace is a gift that frees us to be generous people.  Grace is the life-changer that upsets all the fallen systems of this world.  Grace teaches us to live by an abundance mentality as opposed to living with a scarcity mentality. We can extend the grace of Jesus to the world by living generous lives with our time, our talents and our treasures.

What Christianity has to uniquely offer the world is a promise of reconciliation with God (vertical integration) and reconciliation to each other (horizontal integration). The Kingdom of Heaven’s presence can be most seen in people experiencing reconciliation with God and reconciliation with other people, across the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, politics and conflict. Reconciliation is the precedent to authentic relationship. As we were made to be in a relationship with God, it is our desire to move beyond casual interactions into a deep, meaningful friendship with God and others through the spirit of reconciliation.

Excellence is the right people doing the right things for the right reasons, and doing them to the best of their ability to honor God, not themselves. To try and attain perfection is not realistic. Excellence is not perfection. We simply want everything we do to reflect excellence for Jesus Christ and be an inspiration to others, to state with our actions that we genuinely and deeply care. We are bringing our “A–game” in all that we do. We believe the community of Christ ought to be the most excellent place in the world.

We believe that growth begins at the place of authenticity: acknowledging who we really are as broken and sin-stained people with deep flaws and a need for healing and wholeness. We believe that the enemy of authenticity is a tendency toward religious image management. We believe that church contexts have a tendency to produce synthetic lives that have the appearance of godliness but deny its power. Our world has synthetic religious fatigue; our prayer is “God, make us real. Now, with your help, help us become ourselves, the vision of us you had in mind when you made us.”

Truth is ultimate reality. Truth does not exist because we choose to believe in it. Truth is the way it is, whether we believe it or not. Christ said, “I am the way and the truth and the life.” We believe Jesus Christ embodies truth and represents the way things really are in this life. Christ exposes us to the deepest levels of our existence and shows us what it is like at the root of everything. We are not connecting to a religion but a reality, so we can be set free by aligning ourselves with reality.