Essence:

Water can transform the most barren landscape into a garden of incredible beauty and fruitfulness. Water sustains us. Dehydration debilitates the human body, and thirst is a universal condition experienced and understood by all. Water makes life on our planet possible.

With this in mind, the mission and purpose of the Aqueous Community can be best expressed by exaning examples from the scriptures where water is used as a metaphor to articulate life in the Kingdom of God as described and modeled by Jesus Christ. In this respect, we long to be a community truly moved and marked by these metaphors. Our hope and prayer is that we would live up to this definition and truly be aqueous-- like water, partaking of its nature, and abounding in it--immersed in a collective life committed to Encountering Christ, Engaging Culture, and Experiencing Community.

Encountering Christ:

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus continually announces the breaking in of a new kind of Kingdom. He spoke of a realm and reality where people would be connected to God, flooded with the substance and life of God learning how to live in the world and toward one another according to God's way, enabled by God's power. This way of living was so dynamic and different that Jesus needed to first model it through his own actions, and then, describe it, using all kinds of alternative language and metaphor outside of the established religious paradigm to offer people clues to its discovery. Jesus frequently referenced the idea of thirst and drinking "living water" to describe the complete otherness and profound transformative reality of what it is like to be saturated with this God kind of life. We are a community of faith who are committed to continually encountering this living Christ and the life he speaks of when he declares: "If you are thirsty, come to me! If you believe in me, come and drink! For the Scriptures declare that rivers of living water will flow out from within." (John 7:37-38, Isaiah 55:1-3, John 4:10-26, John 20:30-31)

Engaging Culture:

People who have begun to enter the kind of life Jesus speaks of, life in the Kingdom of God, resonate with the language of the scriptures which refers to them as "ambassadors" of that Kingdom. Ambassadors live fully immersed and engaged in their host culture while speaking and acting as representatives of another. With this understanding we desire to follow the example of Christ, echoing his message that this Kingdom is present and available to all, inviting others to drink deeply of this God kind of life, and acting with him to extend a foretaste of what this Kingdom is like through hospitality, generosity, and service . "Let each one who hears... say, "Come." Let the thirsty ones come--anyone who wants to. Let them come and drink the water of life without charge." "If anyone gives... a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward." (Revelation 22:17, Matthew 10:42, Matthew 28:18-20, 2 Corinthians 5:17-20, Luke 14:12-14, Hebrews 13:14-16)

Experiencing Community:

Jesus once took a basin of water and demonstrated a new kind of relational reality that represented a radical departure from typical interaction in human Kingdoms. "After washing their feet, he put on his robe again and sat down and asked, "Do you understand what I was doing? You call me 'Teacher and 'Lord,' and you are right, because it is true. And since I, the Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash each other's feet. I have given you an example to follow. Do as I have done to you." In the context of the time in which Christ lived, the washing of feet was an act of service performed by only the lowliest. As the Master, Jesus modeled a dynamic of community, relationship and service that was to subvert the entire known order of hierarchy and power. In the community of faith, we are all invited to learn from Christ"s action and to become a people who share life serving and caring for one another. Part of our mission is to become a community of faith in which this type of love, connection and service flourishes therefore functioning as a sign and foretaste of the breaking in of this new kind of Kingdom and reality. (Mark 12:29-34, John 13:12-15, Romans 12:10, Matthew 20:26-28, Philippians 2:3-7)