About Us

Love God

God’s Worthiness God is great and worthy to be praised. One of the most fundamental truths is that God is more important than everything else in the whole entire world combined. And we must live our lives out of that belief. He created us, redeemed us, and sustains us. Like the old song says, “Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were a present far too small. Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.” This is the foundation for everything else we value.

Biblical Authority The Bible is the only way to truly understand God. We can look at science, geography, or history and figure out things like: “God is creative, God is huge, God is powerful” but we really need the revealed Word of God to know Him: His priorities, His commands, His love. Good News Church recognizes the Bible as the final authority and ultimate standard for all faith and practice.

The Gospel In order to properly relate to God we must understand that the central message of the Bible is the gospel (good news). We believe this message can basically be summed up in words like these from the Apostle Paul, "...that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures..."" Turning from sin to Christ and trusting in his death and resurrection is the only way to escape the penalty of sin and have true, good, eternal, life change. Since this is the central message of the Bible, we want it to be the central message of Good News Church.

Corporate Worship This is what we do as an assembly of God’s people on Sunday mornings. Weekly corporate worship seems to be both the New Testament and Old Testament pattern. This is one reason why we strive to have a God-honoring Sunday morning worship gathering.

Lifestyle Worship Worship is far more than attending an event or service. It is primarily a lifestyle. Outside of simply attending a weekly meeting, we believe that Christians ought to live a God-honoring life. This happens primarily through learning and applying the message of the Bible. As people apply the Bible to their lives, they can have good prayer lives, overcome sin patterns, have God-honoring marriages, finances, parenting, etc. and they can think, feel, and act like God wants them to.

Relationship over Rules We strive for a church culture that influences Christians to view their actions more through the lens of “I must relate to God rightly” rather than “I must obey a list of rules.” For instance when someone steals something, it is probably better to realize, “Oh no! I love money more than God; I must repent and turn back to God,” rather than for them to think, “Uh oh, I broke #8. I need to try harder to be a good person.”

Practitioners, not just Theologians We believe in not only teaching people the Scriptures, but also in teaching people to apply the Scriptures. Educating people on theology without training them to live it out will just produce prideful jerks that know a lot of Bible verses. The church must be filled with practitioners, not just theologians. This means that our Bible-teaching must be focused on life change.

Love Each Other

Christian Community Good News Church views the Christian life as a team sport. God didn’t intend for us to live the Christian life alone. This means we encourage people to live their lives before God not only as individuals, but also as a group. There are too many commands in the Bible such as “Love each other,” “Forgive each other,” and “Encourage each other,” that simply cannot be obeyed as individuals who are disconnected from other Christians.

Spiritual Lives Are “Personal” But They Are Not “Private” God says in the Bible that He wants us to see to it that each of us doesn’t have a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from Him. We believe that we must encourage each other in our faith on a regular basis so that sin doesn’t harden our hearts. This means that my spiritual life is not just my business. It’s actually a bunch of other people’s business too.

Relationships over Attendance We value “being the church” over “attending the church.” It is possible for someone to attend a church service every single week and still not actually be a part of the fellowship of that church. They can sit in the back row and slip out during the closing song and never have to talk to anybody. This is missing the point. Attendance should only be a step in the process of people moving toward “walking with the wise so that they will become wise.” At Good News, we encourage every believer to get together with other Christians in smaller environments so that they can connect in meaningful relationships with each other.

Every Member is a Minister No church can function properly when it views one person, or a select few people, as the people who do the ministry. We believe every Christian is an important part of the body and that he (or she) must serve everyone else. We think you can tell when a church really gets going good by noticing how many people come for the sake of the other people in the church rather than coming for what they can get out of the church themselves.

Love People Who Don't Know God Yet

Emphasis on OutreachWe believe that, because of the natural human tendency to be inward-focused, there will probably be times when we must put what feels like a disproportionate amount of emphasis on being concerned about outsiders, in order to counteract that strong desire to only care about the people who are already attending.

From Lost to Leader The starting point for discipleship is “pagan” and the ending point is “fully devoted minister” (not necessarily a pastor… we just mean someone who serves God with their life). In other words, we believe that we must try to move people from lost to leader. This means that simply helping someone to “become a Christian” is not the end goal. We must disciple them to maturity. But this also means that our starting point is not Christians from other churches (ie: our goal is to reach unbelievers, not Lutherans.)

Culturally Relevant Most of the Christians that we know believe that in order to reach Africans (or South Americans or Asians) for Jesus we must be aware of and adapt to their culture. In other words, most Christians seem to think that altering church architecture, music, food, décor, language, etc. is a necessary part of being a missionary. But for some reason, we’ve noticed that a lot of those same people seem to be completely unwilling to adapt their practices to the current culture that lives here in the United States. They see no need to be missionaries to their own towns. We believe that the church must be aware of and adapt (to “reach out” not to “sell out”) to the immediate culture in order to make disciples more effectively.

Contemporary We’ve noticed that church events and programs are often more helpful and meaningful to emerging generations if they are done in modern language and are done in a style that fits the times. Much of the Bible was written in fairly casual language that was current at the time, and in a style that was fairly relevant to the immediate culture.

Consideration for Outsiders This is one reason why our services have upbeat music, a casual atmosphere, and relevant messages. We want to show consideration to people who are unfamiliar with church. We figure that we shouldn’t say something like “I’m so glad I’ve been washed in the blood of the lamb!” without explaining what it means. (By the way, if you didn’t already know, it means, “We are glad that we’ve been forgiven because of what Jesus did when he died on the cross.”) This just seems to be considerate toward people who haven’t learned Christianese yet. One of our goals is to never seem unnecessarily “creepy” to non-church people.

General Values

Excellence If something is worth doing, it is worth doing well. We want our church programs and activities to be done in such a way that people are proud to invite their friends to them. We really try hard not to do things that would cause someone to feel that they might need to apologize for something that was needlessly low in quality. But we also try not to get too carried away: the goal is excellence, not perfection.

Simplicity Anytime you have a church with lots of people, you have lots of preferences, lots of good ideas, and lots of potential directions to go in. This is why most churches naturally gravitate toward complexity and not simplicity. The problem with that is that it is almost impossible to do lots of things excellently at the same time. Valuing simplicity means we will have to say “no” to some genuinely good ideas, in order to focus on a small number of things that we have decided to do with excellence.

Intentionality We think that virtually everything a church does ought to be an intentional step in a particular direction. In other words, we shouldn’t just start a program because it’s popular (ex: “We need a Mom’s Morning Out Program because the Methodists have one!”). We believe that each decision and/or program that a church chooses to implement ought to be done for a specific reason and with a particular goal in mind.