Our Values

OUR CORE VALUE

The Core Value for SCC is to live in mutual and ever-growing awareness and acceptance of God’s limitless and unfailing Love for all of us.

We want to respond to this Love with love, and aim to reflect this in our care for each other and the world we inhabit, as we see modelled for us through the life and teachings of Jesus.

CORE INTENTIONS

Some Core Intentions: In devotion to Jesus, and in response to God’s Love, we dedicate ourselves to being intentional about sharing these priorities:

– Open Hearts: We want to be people who respond to Love with gratitude, celebration, humility, and a willingness to learn, share, and persevere as we walk this out together.

– Creative Service: We want to seek out creative and faithful ways to embody this Love together by collectively serving one another, caring for those around us (particularly the poor and marginalized), and nurturing the Earth as it nurtures us.

– Authenticity: We want to live our lives together with honesty and transparency, vulnerably embracing our humanity, recognising our interdependence, and humbly facing and addressing our weaknesses and conflicts.

– Diversity & Inclusion: We want to prioritize diversity among us, recognizing that we need each other, and that through this diversity we find all the gifts that we need to live and serve well together.

– Growing Together: We want to nurture and facilitate the movement toward healing, maturing, and justice in our midst, as we recognize our ongoing need for new insight, evolution, and grace.

– Rooted with Wings: We want to remain rooted in the best parts of Christian tradition and remember our freedom to follow the Spirit at work in and among us today.

CORE DISTINCTIVES

Some Core Distinctives: Just as we welcome the diversity in our midst, we also value the diversity of other communities that seek to serve and follow Love.

Here are some of the ways that we offer our unique collective personality:

– Collective Leadership: We choose collective leadership with all of its life-giving potentials, challenges and inefficiencies.

– Hospitality: We offer our building as the Victoria St. Centre to facilitate care for the community in which religious difference is not an obstacle, seeking to be generous and hospitable to those around us.

– Openly Affirming: We fully affirm LGBTQ+ folks, and celebrate their lives, their gifts, and their relationships. We aim to be a safe and brave space for the welcoming and affirmation of all those often excluded in society, and in churches in particular.

– Embracing Imperfection: Recognizing the beauty of being human, we celebrate our messiness and imperfection by welcoming the informal, the personal, the unpolished, and the unscripted.

– Interfaith Relations: We love and value a diversity of wisdom traditions, within and beyond Christianity, and we seek to learn from, and form relationships with, individuals and varied faith communities.  We welcome the tension and breadth that come from integrating different streams of faith at SCC, even as we recognize that Christian contemplative traditions may be our most central stream.

– Nurturing Community: We prioritize ways of gathering that facilitate connection, such as coffee time during services, and small interest groups like game nights, movie nights, writers circles, song circles, contemplation groups, workshops, youth groups, potlucks, and intergenerational activities, offering pathways for meaningful connection and belonging that extend beyond regular church attendance.