About The Village

The Village is a values-driven ministry of Christ-followers that seeks to bring Christ to post-modern people in the Tucson community and to offer acceptance, kindness, and love to those who are broken, hurting, and in pain. To that end we seek to live out the following values.

Community

Foremost among our values is that we are called to be the body of Christ and to live in community with each other. We recognize that being together is hard and that it takes work and sacrifice to be able to truly love and serve each other. We also find that as we do that better we see those who are without Christ attracted to him through us. We find that most people who end up as members of the Village are first drawn in to the rich sense of community that we have and share. We often throw parties and share meals in our homes as a way to offer the gifts of love and hospitality to others.

We believe that eating together is a powerful way to build relationships with each other and the world. We serve pizza and salad after our Sunday evening service in order to encourage conversation and relationship building. Messages are preached in such a way that the community normally has opportunity to also speak into the passage. Various events such as a writer’s group, Bible studies, philosophy discussions, and parties are held in order to have places to connect our community with the broader community of Tucson. We teach and are taught to submit ourselves to the community and to listen for the truth that the community speaks into our lives. We strive to be a community known by its love.

Accessibility

From the beginning we have believed that the Village should be a place where anyone can come and be accepted. We have fought hard against our own prejudices and lies so that we can be doorways to the kingdom of God. We resist our exclusionary ways in order to allow people to find God at their own pace and in their own way. We seek to understand the perspective of others and to love them as they are. Because we believe that we all bear the image of our Creator, we hope to search out that image in each other and to call it out. We find that Jesus was willing to be associated with those whom society thought were outcasts and we seek to emulate Jesus as we engage the people he places in our path. We hope to place no stumbling block between Jesus and the people we meet, except for the gospel itself.

Authenticity

We believe that walking the narrow way Jesus calls us to is difficult and we attempt to be honest about the struggle and to be honest about what the walk is all about. We want our community to be a community that is unafraid to confess sin and failure and we want to be sure that people count the cost as they begin their walk with Jesus. In our teaching, counseling, discipling, and preaching we choose to be vulnerable and open. We also choose to weep with those who mourn and rejoice with those who rejoice. We do not sugarcoat the journey and we spend a good deal of our time dealing with our own sin as well as the sin of those we have come to love as sisters and brothers. We try to do this as publicly as we dare, so that others can overcome their own fears of being found out. We are eager to display not only the good hearts God has placed in us, but also the residue of the old man that we still drag around.

Creativity

At the Village we believe that people are made in the image of a creative God and that because that is true, we also are creative. Calling people to be creative in the way God has uniquely fashioned them is a huge part of our being in community. We call on people to attempt to draw, paint, photograph, sculpt, write poetry and computer programs, create music, write lyrics, cook, bake, garden, renovate buildings, and engage in other creative endeavors and then share the product of that creativity with the community. We choose to use worship songs that are created in our own community or in other nearby communities where we find relationships. We display the creativity of our community as part of our offering to God. We invite each other to use our creativity in our jobs and in our other relationships to help us better engage the One who made us.

We strive to not judge creative offerings by the skill offered, but on how it reveals the heart of the person who has created the offering. We regularly invite people to try their hand at something they have never done, were told they did poorly, or been told they do not have the talent to do and make it an offering to God. We sponsor art shows, music concerts, and places to proffer the things we have baked or cooked to the Village community and to the broader community. We have also made the website a place to display the creativity of our community.

Truth

We believe in truth. We also believe that the evil one distorts the truth and calls us to believe lies. We make it our passion to speak the truth in love to each other, that is, to speak the truth to each other as we weep the losses and the struggles of being called to deal with lies we have chosen to believe. We believe the Bible is true and that it is a primary place where God speaks truth to us. We also believe that God speaks truth to us in our community and through the still, small voice of his Spirit. We try to speak truth to the cultural lies of the Tucson community as well as offering the way, the truth, and the life of Jesus to those who need desperately to hear the simple, painful beauty of truth. We attempt to speak the truth without harsh judgement and condemnation, but with the gentle love of Jesus and a deep awareness of our own willingness to hang on to lies.

Disciplines

We believe that the path to freedom, healing and joy is found in the disciplines of prayer, reading God’s Word, meditating, fasting, and self-denial, as well as in other spiritual disciplines. We regularly invite each other into these disciplines to help each other find deeper intimacy with God. We have invited people into times of solitude and reflection and try to keep the practice of the disciplines part of our own routines. The elders regularly pray over and anoint people with oil for the purpose of bringing healing and hope. We have invited people into our homes for a season in order to help them grow more disciplined lives in the area of resisting addictive behaviors or handling their financial affairs. We regularly invite people who struggle with sin patterns to submit themselves to those in the broader community who are able to speak truth to the lies they believe. Annually we covenant together to allow ourselves to be disciplined by those God has placed in spiritual authority over us.

The Village is a group of 60-70 people seeking to live out these values as they are used by the King to expand his kingdom. We believe the kingdom is expanded when we come to know Jesus, deal with our fear and shame, choose to walk in the truth, and are healed from our pain. Throughout the past six years we have been used of God to expand the kingdom while living out these values. We are not program driven, but are deeply and intentionally relationally driven. Our growth has been slow and steady and often those who have come to us move on into the greater mission of advancing the kingdom elsewhere. Because we are relationally driven, we have chosen to pay two pastors and have a leadership group of ten people. Our expectation is that leadership involves the intensive discipleship of one or more individuals, while also being discipled by others. The church was founded on a method of discipleship first espoused in the writings of Larry Crabb and Dan Allender, refined in the counseling ministry of John and Patti Cepin, and further refined in the leadership of the Village.

Our intention is to continue the processes we have begun and we hope to start and shape other similar communities as we grow larger. We recognize the inherent difficulty in maintaining intimate relationship as size increases and are intentional about meeting that concern with either spinning off new communities or adding new leaders and disciplers into our leadership community. God has blessed us over these years from the original group of a dozen to a thriving, vibrant community that continues to grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.