In John 20:21, Jesus, on the evening of the first day of God’s new week (the evening of His resurrection) said to His disciples, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.”  Care-In-Action, or CIA for short, is about our doing the things Jesus did in the way He did them.  It’s about making God’s business our business and then purposefully getting involved in God’s rescue, restoration, renewal, and reconnection business.  So watch for our CIA season in the spring!

Transforming Lives – Impacting Community.

Together they spent years leading the young people in their home church and welcoming people into their lives as the norm and not the exception of Christian life.  During that time, Paul pioneered Walsall Street Teams, a charity focused on individuals trapped in the sex industry, and which continues to flourish today.  Not your conventional pastor, today Paul as the People Pastor operates a carpentry business, alongside his role as senior pastor.  Liz heads up the preaching team, and leads and continues to develop the central Small Group framework. Her experience in the UK in the field of trauma allowed her to co-teach counselling along with her work in Walsall Street Teams during the years in the UK.  Together they guide the journey at The People Church.

Christians were once referred to as People of the Way.  We like the sound of that because a “way” by definition influences our actions as well as our beliefs.  When you walk into our building you’ll see our Ways on our walls….

Ways for Life:
Belonging to God the Father:   Everything starts here:  knowing and being known as sons and daughters.

Relationship; adults, young people and children:  We value wisdom gained by life experience, with each generation contributing to another in order to decrease the gap, not increase it.

The Bible for productive lives:   We believe the Bible is God’s word to us, written in human words, speaking more about what faith does, rather than just what faith is, and so with assurance we can trust the Bible for living productive lives.

Baptized into the life of Jesus:  We believe baptism is an essential act of obedience:  through the waters into new life, new family, new beginnings, new plans and new purposes.

Prayer for living life:  Just as relationship without communication is endurable but not necessarily enjoyable, we believe prayer is essential for all areas and aspects of our lives because it’s how we talk to God.

Indwelt and empowered by the Holy Spirit:  We believe that life without the Holy Spirit is like building a house without foundations – it can be done but it’s really not recommended.  We want to seek the Holy Spirit’s strength, plans, purposes and transforming presence, embracing His gifts for our own growth and for the good of other people’s lives.

Heaven’s life lived today:  When we talk about heaven we don’t mean that we live just waiting to go to heaven but rather that we become heaven’s life-carriers in every situation we encounter, as a preview of the fulfillment of the Age to come.

Advancing God’s love together:  We believe that we are called to alert people to God and to demonstrate the reality that God has not abandoned His world, by engaging in genuine and respectful dialogue and by joining God, together, in His ventures bringing rescue, restoration, renewal and reconnection to people’s lives with no strings attached.

Transformed through breaking bread:  Following as Jesus did, we celebrate communion:  corporately, personally and in the context of small groups of people, communing with each other and with God’s healing and transforming presence.

Giving with integrity and joy:  When it comes to our money we believe that “what belongs to me, belongs to God first,” so we give as God’s people, reflecting His generosity.

Life by the way of forgiveness:  While learning to live by the way of forgiveness is certainly costly and not particularly popular today, we believe it’s a practice that leads to God’s restoration and renewal in our lives, so why wouldn’t we seek after this wholeheartedly?

Leading by serving and mentoring:  Leaders, both men and women, lead by serving and mentoring people into the ways of Jesus by making disciples, and they are drawn to do this well before they get a title.

That’s what we think about when we think:  Ways for Life.

- You’ll find them all in scripture.

So what does this look like on a Sunday?  Well, we like to sing, loudly, vibrantly and sometimes country!  We invite our children to experience this before they leave for their space together. When it comes to preaching, we work as a team, teaching that we are part of the biblical story… we are transformational… we are missional….

We want to be open to the presence and direction of God’s Spirit, at work in us and through us, so there’s always opportunity to be prayed with.  There is plenty of tea and coffee afterwards if you want to chat.  We celebrate communion bimonthly but many more times in between in our Teams.  And finally we love eating together so we aim to do that monthly in potlucks after the service.

The People Church: Transform. Participate. Contribute.