Our Calling & Passion

Engaging people beyond the reach of the church

Partnering with our neighbours and community in collective transformation;
We partner with people in our neighbourhood, and city, to make a real difference, to bless and bring hope. Our dream is that our presence becomes vital and treasured by our friends and community, thus bringing the fragrance of Christ to real needs. While we participate in global causes and issues, we act and live locally. We’re involved in justice, poverty, community development, restoration post-Katrina, and more.

Share with our neighbors a common pilgrimage towards Christ;
We live Incarnationally and submersed in and amongst a normal neighbourhood, where we share common life and authentic relationships. In this, we seek serve and sacrificially bless those who do not know or follow God. We avoid the program approach to ministry, instead preferring incarnation where people come to trust us and know we care about them and they are not clients or projects.

Creating fresh expressions of Biblical faith communities [church] which are culturally relevant to our contexts;
We are wrestling with the cultural captivity in how we live, as well as the inherited cultural captivity in our understanding in what it is to “be the church”. To this end, we wrestle to strip away those culture traditions and ethos which are no longer relevant, and which often become hindrances to helping people know, understand, emulate and follow Christ. To this end, the expression of church for us is not Sunday centric but a balance and posture of being God’s people in how we serve, bless, engage and follow Jesus together. When we are gathered together, our form of church, our liturgy, is quite different and reflects our cultural context. It is casual, interactive and participatory and involves a focus on who we are and the implications of how we live our lives daily.

Empower likeminded emerging leaders in fresh expressions and communities in our cities;
We gather and empower other communities similar to us around New Orleans and in other cities. Through relational mentoring and recognition as fellow pilgrims in this innovation, we seek to create environments that encourage, empower, equip and transform others. We host a regular gathering of local missional leaders in a variety of communities throughout metropolitan New Orleans.

We form, equip, empower and launch new teams of emerging leaders to replicate and multiply CRM Communitas communities nationally and internationally;
We are a real world context where staff, coming into CRM are able to come, be formed and transformed as they walk with us in being the church in our neighbourhood and city. Our purpose is to empower the formation of teams to deploy in the future to innovate and create like communities in other cities nationally and beyond.