Value: Community-Focused

What’s your story? 

No matter what your story is, you aren’t the author of your story - God is! 

When God is the author of your story, no two stories are alike. No matter how your story unfolds, no one fully knows what their story holds next. Every story — no matter how they are written — has two key ingredients. The first is to be in right relationship with God. The second is the need to be in right relationship with others.

Both are possible through reconciliation. Reconciliation is at the heart of one of Oak Hill’s core values, Community Focused. To be community focused is to understand our collective and desperate need for well-being, in an environment where people are loved, nurtured, and cared for in the Name of Jesus Christ.

Reconciliation means to change thoroughly. It is the re-establishment of an interrupted or broken relationship. Because of reconciliation with the Father, we no longer look at others as we once did. In Christ, the old is gone, the new has come (see 2 Corinthians 5:14-21). 

We as a church — the people of God — exist for others. Christ has invited us to be His ambassadors, seeing and responding to people so they can know the Author of the best story possible. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “The Church is only the Church when it exists for others … not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell men of every calling what it means to live for Christ, to exist for others.” This is our privilege and joy as those reconciled to God.