After almost 8 years of doing life together (in 2011), this is my attempt to name what’s been in the background, hanging in the air, as part of our culture but has yet to named and said out loud. If someone asked me what Liquid is, this is what I’d tell them…

IDENTITY (worth)
who we are individually

• Freedom & authenticity
  • Freedom to share your struggles without fear of judgment
  • Permission to be yourself at your most basic and vulnerable levels
• Openness & boundaries
  • Openness is a readiness to receive one another (& new people) without judgment or condemnation (no matter how subtle) while maintaining a healthy understanding you always have the ability to say no
  • Freedom and openness quickly degenerate into bondage without discipline and healthy boundaries
• Free Space
  • Freewill is the groundwork for love (which as defined is by choice)
  • Free space is when all obstacles in the way have been removed; it is the vital ingredient for genuine connections to happen and grow.
• Intention & decision
  • You are fully alive when you recognize you can choose to love
  • You get out of your life and our community what you put into it

FAMILY (context)
who we are we together

• Commitment & responsibility to one another
  • Carving out room for one another in our busy lives
  • Your choices have an impact on the people around you and affect others in positive or negative ways (sometimes both)
  • Everyone in the family takes ownership for the family (i.e. stewardship)
• Different roles for different people
  • A brother to me may be an uncle to you or a daughter to you may be a distant cousin to me
  • Our relationships to one another and roles to one another are dynamic and may completely shift over time (like rhythms & seasons)
• Everyone has a voice
  • Children are as much a vital member of our community as the adults that care for them
  • Equality in age, martial status, and gender
• Relational gateway
  • You gain entrance into someone else’s life (and thus the life our community) by how much you are invested in them
  • Building trust is the bridge that can travel great distances between diverse groups of people

STRUCTURE (process)
how we do life together

• Structures exist to serve us
  • We are not bound by arbitrary structures created by man in our generation or the generations before us
  • Structures are both temporary and adjustable
• Time
  • Slowness of growth has enabled us to sift through the chaos of life to reveal what’s most important (ex. If what I think is important now is still important in five years, it has a much greater sense of being true)
  • Time is a structural invention of mankind; a tool to interact with reality, not to be mistaken for reality itself
• Rhythms & seasons
  • Recognizing and accepting patterns of life with beginnings and endings, ebb and flow, life and death, activity and rest
  • A recipe for long-term stability and sustainability
• Bite-sized small groups
  • Genuine growth always starts small and goes to big; rarely, if ever is it the other way around
  • Small groups are built on relationships of 2’s and 3’s; they are the substance of our community and have self-governing autonomy to make the decisions they need to do move towards our collective vision
• Leadership within a leaderless organism
  • Leadership becomes more itself—servant-hood; biblical authority commands submission only by the example of great character, not by power or position
  • Direction is derived from cooperative and often mutual submission
• Liturgy
  • Gathering together
  • Sharing communion

VISION (life)
why we do what we do

• Vision
  • To be alive is to grow; if you are not growing, you are dead, static, stillborn
  • Shared belief in Christ
• Mission
  • To pursue what’s best for one another given the reality of Christ.
  • Our group exists for you.  We come together to help you answer the question what do you need to grow deeper into the everlasting life. You are the only one who can answer that question for you, yet it is not a question answered in isolation.
  • Our relationship to one another is like that of a family, unchanging in nature; yet the quality of each relationship is always in motion, dependent on our individual investment (with God, ourselves, our families, our community and neighbors).
  • While we are bound by finite limitations, our own circumstances, abilities, and understandings yet somehow always moving and growing beyond them; for every yes, there also seems to be a not yet (we are the church, but not fully)

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