Our Values

We aspire to be:

1. A Word-Centered Church: We want to be a church that is shaped by the Word of God in all of life. In our corporate worship, we are committed to reading the Word, praying the Word, singing the Word, preaching the Word, and seeing the Word through baptism and the Lord’s Supper. We are especially committed to weekly expository preaching, where we preach through chapter by chapter and verse by verse through the books of the Bible, where the point of the sermon is the point of the passage. But our desire is not only to hear the Word on Sundays—we want to obey it every day. We want the Word to dwell richly among us as we read it personally, encourage one another with it, and submit every part of our lives to it.

2. A Gospel-Centered Church: “The church is the Gospel made visible.” We want to be marked by the Gospel as the center of our church’s teaching and our life together. We want to see the health of our church fostered through ordinary and regular Gospel-centered means.

3. A Prayer-Fueled Church: As Jesus says, “My house shall be a house of prayer.” We desire NCBC to be a church marked by private and corporate prayer-fulness. We hope to cultivate prayerfulness by teaching, practicing, and emphasizing private and corporate prayer, as well as encouraging individual and collective seasons of fasting and prayer.

4. A Multi-Ethnic & Multi-Generational Church: We want to faithfully reflect the community we are ministering to. So, we will prayerfully, intentionally, and actively seek to be ethnically, generationally, and socio-economically diverse in our leadership and our membership as the Spirit sees fit. Not just for diversity’s sake, but for unity in diversity’s sake. We believe that “unity is God’s goal for the local church, diversity is God’s gift for the local church, and discipleship is God’s plan for church growth.” Hence, we will seek to teach and model a Christ-centered, Gospel-revealing diversity for the sake of God’s glory.

5. An Evangelistic Church: In order to reflect our community, we must be present and engaged. We will prayerfully, intentionally, actively, and regularly engage the community evangelistically.

6. A Discipling Church: We desire to be a growing church committed to making disciples who make disciples. We will rely on the Lord to raise up elders, missionaries, and church planters from within the church, and invest in pastoral residents, setting aside our budget for these purposes.

7. A Healthy Church: We want to be a healthy church committed to a biblical understanding of 1) faithful expositional preaching, 2) sound biblical theology, 3) the Gospel, 4) conversion, 5) evangelism, 6) church membership, 7) church discipline, 8) discipleship and 9) church leadership.

   For more information on these principles visit www.9marks.org.