Question of the Week #1: What kind of church is Centre Church?
That’s a really big question! It’s a bit like asking what it means to be a dual citizen of the UK and Canada – there’s SO MUCH THERE. But we can probably summarize it like this: Centre Church is what we call a Word and Spirit church. In other words, we believe that the Bible is 100% true, trustworthy, and still transformative for us today.
And we also believe that the Holy Spirit didn’t retire at the end of Acts. We believe he’s still working—still healing, guiding us, and empowering us, and even performing miracles in and through us today. Because of that, we’d sometimes refer to ourselves as a “continuationist” church – in other words, we believe what the Bible calls the gifts of the Spirit still continue today.
Now, it’s important to say that we LOVE our Pentecostal brothers and sisters in Christ, but we have a little bit of a different approach how we interpret certain things, especially in relation to the Holy Spirit. And that’s OK. We’re just doing our best…as many churches are, to stick as closely as possible to what we see in the Bible and live it out with integrity. If you have questions about specifics, that’s okay. Feel free to reach out, it’s okay to have a discussion.
Having said that, we’re not a lone ranger church. We’re proud to be a part of a global family of churches called Commission, which is itself a part of a bigger movement called New Frontiers, which is a family of over 6,000 churches worldwide. This means that we have the support, wisdom, and relationships of a huge church family, which is AWESOME. However, we’re still very much a local, personal, and focused on Red Deer church.
Now what about style? In terms of style, we’re passionate about being a church where people actually talk to you when you come along to a service. We want to be a place where, whatever our size, people know your name. We’re all about relationships! We want to be so focused on relationship and real connection. Let me be really clear: we’re not there yet – we’ve got a long way to go. We’re working on that, and will probably always be working on that. But that’s our heartbeat. We want to be grounded in the word, open to the Spirit and built on love, not legalism.
That’s it for our question of the week!
If you have any other questions, feel free to email us at info@wearecentrechurch.ca – or even better, come and hang out with us this Sunday at 10:30. See you next week!.
