While I understand where that question comes from, it still baffles me a bit. Aren’t we all faith based? Whether we recognize it or not, we are driven by what many refer to as our world view.

While you may not be able to articulate it, you make choices based on what you believe about life. To quote Bob Dylan, “You gotta serve somebody.” Or, to paraphrase, “You gotta have faith in something.

Academics tend to categorize world views in one of three buckets:  Innocence/guilt, honor/shame, and power/fear.  While these are very helpful in understanding a culture and how it operates, what we’re talking about here is more about what shapes the decisions we as an organization make.  And in that context, we have a Biblical world view.

What we discover, however, is people have very distinct boxes they want to put organizations in who have that world view.  Most often, they limit, intentionally or not, those organizations to what they think of as traditional “church work” and create a divide between the holy and the secular.  That’s not us.

We believe God is missional and He is about the mission of reconciliation of lost and hurting people to Him and His perfect plan for their lives.  We do not, however, limit God’s work to only working in relational boxes and ignoring the other realities of our existence.  In Walking with the Poor, Bryant Meyers provides a useful categorization of this reality as consisting of: relationships with others; our work, or the economy; creation, or the environment; and with God where God is central to all.  We would elaborate further and say that through the work of the cross, God has redeemed all of those arenas.

While much more could be said, this is why our work isn’t contained to those traditional church boxes.  We believe God is at work in all arenas of life and invites us to join Him, and has specific commands for the church to be involved in (see blog post on why the church should be involved in development), in all of these arenas.