INCLUSIVE & THOUGHTFUL
We’re an inclusive church community that helps people take their next steps in response to God’s unconditional love. We’re particularly committed to the excluded, ignored, and questioning.
Kindred is an LGBT+ affirming community.
We Are Kindred
Core Values
We are theologically thoughtful.
When it comes to faith, we don’t settle for shallow platitudes or clichés. We believe the Christian faith provides extraordinary hope, comfort, and guidance in the face of life’s complexities. And those are found as we engage our hearts and our minds, embracing mystery and wrestling honestly with our deepest concerns. We don’t claim to have all the answers, but we’re committed to pursuing them together as we continually explore what it means to follow Jesus. We’re committed to the practice of ‘traditioned innovation,’ drawing deeply upon the church’s rich theological tradition to inform–but not dictate– the way we ‘do church’ in our modern context.
We are committed to the unchurched.
We believe everyone needs a church family, and we are committed to inviting and welcoming our neighbors who don’t have a church home. You can belong here before you believe. We strive to make all our ministries clear, accessible, and compelling, so that our participants continually grow in their understanding of what we’re doing, how to join in, and why it matters. In this way, we aim to empower people of all backgrounds to grow in their relationships with God and others. We give thanks for all those who’ve found a home at Kindred, but we’re also committed to asking ourselves, ‘Who’s not yet here?’
We are authentic.
Confident in God’s unconditional love, we’re freed from pretending to be something we’re not. To the best of our ability, we honestly acknowledge our imperfections, our struggles, and our need for grace from God and one another. We strive to ‘address the mess,’ not shying away from conversations that challenge us and push us to be better, because we have no illusions of perfection to protect. We laugh together a lot because we don’t take ourselves too seriously.
We are generous.
In response to God’s generous, unconditional love, we strive to grow in our relationship with God and others by giving generously of our time, energy, talents, skills and financial gifts to and through Kindred’s ministries.
We are pursuing inclusive kinship.
‘Kindred’ means family, and we are committed to inviting and welcoming people into our church family who have historically been excluded from or divided within church communities. We are particularly focused on creating a diverse, affirming church community with respect to sexual orientations, gender identities, and racial/ethnic identities.
We are fundamentally relational.
Because we believe in a Triune God who created all people to participate in God’s eternal relationship of love, the foundational purpose of all our ministries (worship, small groups, missions, parties/events, etc.) is to create and nurture growing, life-giving interpersonal connections with God and others. We aim for radical hospitality in everything we do.
Denomination and Affiliation
We are a United Methodist community, and we are part of the University United Methodist Church (UUMC) family. As such, we share many ministry resources, including our finances, with UUMC. We’re blessed by the mutual support and companionship of our wider church family.
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