Core Values

The Church Within A Church Movement values Community, Faith and Justice. We are passionate about bringing these elements together in an expansive theology that seeks to recognize the Divine Spirit within, and around, each of us. Our expansive faith requires actions of justice through relationship-building that tear down walls that privilege some and marginalize and exclude others. Our values are presented below in non-hierarchical order. We hold them all equally and concurrently.

Community

• We gather as community: members and friends valuing relationships, support and connection.
• We seek to gain trust as community, that we may create and maintain safe spaces where we may name and heal our own wounds caused by injustice and marginalization.
• We heal so we can build community with our best selves, and from a place of wholeness and health.
• We seek to act non-hierarchically and inclusively. Bi-annual meetings of the CWACM National Coordinating Team are open, and all are welcome. All who gather have voice and place.
• We honor community values that are ever aware of seeking justice and the common good when we engage in decision making. We will make decisions by reasoning together: listening and speaking our realities, then acting together, as a community, when we have achieved consensus.
• We affirm the ongoing need for individual and community accountability, mutually supporting each other as we endeavor to live and move with integrity.
• We recognize that we are diverse and are in different places in our respective journeys. We will seek to gather, learn, share, trust and grow, both individually and collectively.
• We will be guided by principles of nonviolence, compassion, inclusion and justice.

Faith

• We are a Christian community continually exploring the meanings of “Christian” and “community.”
• We embrace an expansive theology that moves from a sentiment of ‘all are included’ (meaning, all are included into my space) to reaching beyond our limitations of “other” and embracing God’s expansiveness in ALL.
• Our faith is grounded in the mystery of the unknown.
• Our faith pulls us beyond our own understanding of self and connects us with all that is holy.
• In faith, we search for meaning and purpose.
• Our faith calls us to:
  • Be authentic about who we are and who we yearn to be
  • Be in connection with our neighbor
  • Open ourselves to new possibilities
  • Acknowledge a Divine Spirit that speaks to the universe

Justice

• The Church Within A Church Movement was born in 2002 as a response to the overt discrimination of Transgender, Lesbian, Bisexual and Gay persons within the United Methodist Church (UMC).
• We learn, educate, challenge, act and pray for justice.
• We know that injustice is systemic and exists to privilege some and control others.
• We are an anti-racist Movement that sees racism as a foundational block in the wall of “isms.”
• We have a Community Values Statement to which we are all accountable, so that everyone may feel respected and valued at any and all CWAC Movement gatherings.
• This CWAC Movement seeks to engage and dismantle injustice of any kind.

~ Affirmed by the national Coordinating Team, August 16, 2012