Partnerships
Why partner?
We believe that as Christians, we are not meant to experience our spiritual journey alone. Christ founded the church for many reasons. Among these, God intends that we participate with others who are trying to live out their faith by partnering in a community of believers. As a community, we challenge, mentor, and encourage each other, provide accountability, and pool our resources in order to maximize our impact in the world around us. In isolation, it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to mature fully in your faith and to maximize your impact. This is true for the believer who is mature in their faith, and perhaps even more so for the believer who is young in their faith.
Of course, we call this community of believers a church. Churches partnering with other churches can achieve the same advantages that believers partnering with other believers experience. Even more so for a brand new, baby church. Thus we do not plan to take this journey alone. We plan to enlarge our resources and impact through partnerships.
We are already blessed by having organizations who have inspired us, provided logistical support and encouragement, and/or who have pledged their support in terms of financial or people resources. We anticipate that over time others will also join in helping promote our mission. At this point the following have been most influential:
Local Congregations
Cherry Hills Christian Church, Southeast Christian Church, Southlink, Grace Chapel, The Rock, and other local congregations. There are many good established local churches in our area, of which these are some of the best known. Those in our core group have participated with these churches, continue to participate, and believe God is at work through these churches. We still believe God is calling us to begin a new work, which is explained in our page addressing why start a new church. At this point, we do not have a formal partnership with any of these churches, but partner with these in the sense that we all participate as a community of believers for impacting the world for Jesus.
The worldwide Church of the Nazarene:
From the outset, Westminster Church under the direction of Pastor Stan Reeder has been fully supportive and available to help us all along the way. Westminster helped craft the vision, assists with pastoral support and recruitment, provides all kinds of logistic support, supplies accountability, and helped us initiate our children’s program.
Like Westminster Church, the Church of the Nazarene Colorado District under the leadership of District Superintendent Dave Ralph, in conjunction with their New Church Start Committee, have experience, passion, and financial resources dedicated for starting new churches. Over the last 2 years, the Colorado District has been in involved in the start of 20 new churches. In the last 5 years, Westminster church has partnered with the Colorado District in the start of 2 churches, Faith Venture and Iglesia Del Nazareno Westminster.
Denver First Church has a long heritage of outreach, locally and internationally. We are coordinating aspects of the new start effort, and encouraging each other in our collective missions. We are actively exploring options for more direct collaboration.
The international Church of the Nazarene extends throughout the world with1.6 million members in 18,000 congregations located in 151 world areas. The world missions program has one of the most extensive and most successful international outreach programs in the world. Compassionate ministries is worldwide ministry that meets the needs of those around the world who are most desperate for assistance.
K2 The Church
K2 began as a church plant from Michigan to Salt Lake City. A few years ago pastor Dave Nelson along with approximately 30 adults committed to moving from Minnisota to Utah for the purpose of starting a new church. Their approach is contemporary and outreach oriented, designed to impact Salt Lake City. From this core they launched in an old warehouse in Salt Lake City. In the fall of 2006 at their two-year anniversary, they regularly had over 1200 participants at their Sunday services. We are inspired by the families who were committed enough to move across the country for this purpose and believe that many of our values, vision, and styles may overlap with what is being done at K2.
Willow Creek Association
We are just putting together our organizational structure, so haven’t yet formally joined the Willow Creek Association. However, we will likely pursue that affiliation, as we respect their sensitivity to those unchurched, ongoing interest with modern and postmodern trends, emphasis on small groups, recognized leadership, and extensive resources.
While we feel God is leading us to a specific identity and purpose, but we also recognize that God works through a diverse set of styles and identities. When possible, we desire to collaborate and unify with others around the common purpose of following Jesus. More so, we recognize that our region, our nation, and our world offer extensive resources, from others who have gone before and only want to achieve the same or similar purposes. We will thus continue to actively engage in future partnerships, as may seem appropriate.