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About Joy Community Fellowship

About Joy Community Fellowship

What is Joy Community Fellowship about? What unites us and ignites our passion? One way to sum it up would be:

Everywhere and in everything, Joy Community Fellowship longs to magnify Jesus Christ together.

As a church that is longing to magnify Jesus Christ, our passion starts with the gospel, because it is in the gospel that we see Christ’s glory most vividly. It is, after all, “the gospel of the glory of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:4).

Simply put, the gospel is the good news that through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as a substitute for sinners, God has come to reconcile individuals by His grace and renew the whole world for His glory. Because Jesus lived the sinless life that we’ve failed to live and died on the cross to bear the punishment that we deserved for our life of sin, we can be adopted into God’s family through faith in Christ and eternally enjoy His glory when He comes again to make all things new (Revelation 21:5).

Gospel Growth

The gospel is central to us because it is not the first step in a stairway of Christian truth. We do not move on from it and progress to more advanced truths. The gospel is more like the hub of a wheel, around which the entirety of our lives orbit. In Colossians 1:6 Paul writes, “[The gospel] has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and growing – as it does also in you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth.”

Paul is showing that we never outgrow our need for the gospel. The gospel is the key to our salvation and our spiritual growth. The Christian life is the lifelong process of grasping the greatness of the gospel (or, better, the great God revealed in the gospel) and working out its implications into every aspect of our lives.

Ambassadors of Christ

God has given every single Christian the privilege of announcing, or heralding, the good news of God’s free grace to rebellious sinners through Jesus Christ. Sharing the gospel is not only the task of a select few, but of every person who has become a child of God through faith in Christ. In the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20), Jesus charges every follower of Jesus to be engaged in His mission of making disciples.

As ambassadors of King Jesus, we want to see our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, kids’ sports leagues, fitness centers, etc. as our God-given context for sharing the good news of Jesus. We want to be intentional about living as Christ’s ambassadors everywhere He places us, building relationships and engaging people wherever we go with the love of God found in Jesus Christ (see 2 Corinthians 5:17-20).

Adorning the Gospel in Everything

Not only do our lips bear witness to the value of Jesus Christ, but also our lives. In Titus 2:10, Paul urges Christian slaves to work diligently, "…that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior." Paul's words “in everything” express a longing for every aspect of life to be lived in such a way that others are attracted to the preciousness of Christ.

All we do, think, say and feel play a part in our magnifying Christ. How we respond to a pay-cut at work, how we serve an elderly neighbor, how we sit in a traffic jam, how we relate to our spouses, how we care for the needy among us, our reaction when we’re slandered by a co-worker or when the diagnosis is cancer, provide us with opportunities to demonstrate the beauty of our Redeemer. No part of our lives is off-limits in our mission to magnify Jesus.

Magnifying Jesus Together

When we have tasted the life-transforming power of the gospel, our lives are naturally united with other Christians in the singular aim to magnify Christ, producing a dynamic community of love and fellowship. The New Testament repeatedly depicts a vision of the Church which demonstrates that the task of magnifying Christ is a community project.

Biblical commands to love, serve, confess sins, encourage, admonish, comfort, and pray for one another show how intimate the Christian community is called to be. So do biblical images for the Church as a family (Ephesians 2:19) and a body (1 Corinthians 12). Because the metaphors of family and body reflect God’s design for the church to be in intimate relationships, our small groups are vital to our ministry (see the Life Group page on our website for more info).

Come, Magnify the Lord with Us

Our deep longing for Joy Community Fellowship is expressed in the psalmist’s plea:

"Oh, magnify the LORD with me, and let us exalt his name together!" (Psalm 34:3)

Our Lord has revealed Himself supremely in the person and work of Jesus Christ. So we believe that this longing will become an increasing reality through a deepening grasp of the gospel of Christ’s grace, in deep community with others which propels us out into the world to magnify Jesus as ambassadors of His grace, while also living in a way that adorns that good news.

That is, everywhere and in everything, we long to magnify Jesus Christ together.