Our Philosophy

Centered-set, not bounded-set

Imagine a piece of paper with a circle drawn on it. The thing about circles is that you’re either inside of them or you’re outside of them. So we (Kyle & Vince, the two founding pastors here) grew up in Chicagoland. If you’re from another part of the world, sorry. We are Bulls fans. If you support a different basketball team (or don’t care about basketball), sorry! You’re outside of our circle. Let’s call the circle a “bounded set.”

Now imagine a second piece of paper with a big dot right in the middle of it. This shows a different kind of set. The dot in the middle represents what holds the set together, and, let’s say, on this piece of paper there are a million other smaller dots which represent everyone on earth. For each of those dots (us) it’s not about whether we’re inside of something or outside of something. It’s all about relationship — about our orientation to the center — about movement toward the center. We’ll call this a “centered set.”

We wonder if this helps us think about how churches might serve (or not serve) people. For our purposes, let’s say we want to be a centered set with God or Jesus at the center of our set. If so, then this would suggest we put our focus less on whether someone is inside or outside of “faith in Jesus”, and more on someone’s relationship to the center (Jesus) — less on cultural markers of acceptance in a group, and more on practical questions like, “what does it look like to point myself toward Jesus right now, in my current circumstance, or in this or that relationship, or given a specific injustice in the world around me?”

It’s worth noting: a lot of churches seem to operate from a bounded-set mentality. Usually, churches don’t realize how much culture beyond just Jesus their bounded sets entail (or how much culture forms their view of who Jesus is and what Jesus is about in the first place). And it can come as a shock to them that their good intentions to share their gospel might be received by some as insensitive or harmful.

On the other hand, approaching faith in Jesus as a centered-set, in our experience, opens us up to the prospect of connection with just about anyone, regardless of how much or what kind of religious background someone has.