Our Story
Called to live community.
In October of 2005, a group of young people began meeting weekly for a short time of praise and worship and teaching about life in the Holy Spirit. These meetings fostered personal encounters with God that led to conversion and transformation. At first we met in members’ homes, but after a couple of years a local church gave us access to one of their meeting rooms, and we continued to grow.
As the prayer meeting grew and developed, many of our members felt called to live out a more radical commitment to Christ. We wrote our commitments down on paper in the biblical form of a covenant—a solemn agreement to love the Lord with all of our hearts and to love each other with mutual affection, encouragement, and support. This covenant reflects our call to be disciples, lovers of Christian unity, and the light of Christ in our city. Today, the Spirit of Christ is an ecumenical lay community, open to Christians of all denominations. We have young adults, families, students, and wonderful members of all ages. Our community is a melting pot of sorts, with members from North and South America and Asia.
We are also connected with an international network of communities called The Sword of the Spirit. The SOS has member communities in North, Central and South America, Europe, and Asia—roughly 15,000 members in more than 25 nations. We share the SOS’s vision for creating authentic community, for ecumenism, and for building up the church. More information about the Sword of the Spirit can be found on their website: https://www.swordofthespirit.net/
Charismatic Renewal
Being filled with the Spirit.
While our community first began meeting in the 2000s, our teachings have roots in the Charismatic Renewal of the 1960s and 1970s. We believe that this movement, which spread around the entire world, was a profound work of God sent to renew his church.
We believe that the gifts of the Holy Spirit described in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 are for today, for the building up of the body of Christ. We encourage our members to seek and develop them, however we acknowledge the primacy of the virtue of love. As Paul admonished the Corinthians, without love, we are nothing.
Authentic Community
Relationships are the end not the means.
We believe that one of the fruits of Pentecost is Christian community. In Acts 2, the early Christians “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer” (v. 42). They met daily for worship, broke bread in one another’s homes, and called each other on to a life of discipleship.
While our community does not live in common financially like these early Christians, we do strive for the spiritual and relational unity they demonstrated. In our community, Christians of all stripes—Catholics, Baptists, Non-denominationals, etc—break bread in each other’s homes, worship together, and call each other on toward the Lord.
Because we belong to different churches—we are not a church ourselves—we do not have a single, comprehensive statement of faith. Rather, we uphold the truths of the Scriptures as presented in the Nicene and Apostles creeds, the core truths the church has held onto for millenia.