Our Common Values

The Values are the thread that connects the various churches within Movement of Alliance Communities to one another. They establish and shape the atmosphere and infrastructure of our churches.

I. Teaching Through the Bible

We approach our teaching and learning with these three basic questions:
“What does the Bible say? What does it mean? How does it apply to my life?”

Our value of teaching through the Bible…

  • …creates a natural unity and sense of community within our movement—each Sunday morning, we teach and learn from the same scriptures together at all the MAC churches.

  • …requires us to teach all of scripture. By teaching through the Bible, our community is kept spiritually in balance—rather than focusing on popular or “pet” topics, we open ourselves to the full counsel of God. We allow the Holy Spirit to correct, challenge, and strengthen our churches as we move through the scriptures verse by verse.

  • ...allows for Biblical history and culture to set a contextual backdrop for each verse, pointing us to deeper meanings that could be missed or misunderstood when the Word is read superficially or apart from the surrounding text.

  • …maintains the integrity and authenticity of our teaching—anyone who teaches at Exit 59 participates in teaching pool, a weekly meeting where movement pastors hold one another accountable and discuss the week’s chapter together.

II. Organic Church Communities

In short: it’s all about God, not about us.

Think about a dandelion. The seeds of a dandelion don't control where they float or land—they are swept up and carried along by the wind. Where they fall, they take root and bloom. When we call our church community “organic,” we have the dandelion in mind. We are the seeds, and we depend on the Holy Spirit, our wind, to shape, transform, and equip the Exit 59 community.

We believe that God wants to accomplish his plans and his ministry even more than we do. Instead of casting our own vision and programs and then asking God to bless them, we want to find the current of God’s vision and jump in.

In the same way, when it comes to church staff and leadership, we don’t recruit the best and the brightest, but instead, we believe God will “stack the deck” for His church. We rely on the Holy Spirit to call and raise up leaders, elders, and pastors, equipping them for ministry as they live and work out their callings.

III. Bi-vocational Ministry

The Great Commission is for everyone, not just pastors or missionaries. We believe, then, that each of us is called to a life of ministry: a life in which we allow God to use our gifts, passions, intellect, and influence in his work of redeeming people and establishing his kingdom on earth.

The pastors of our church are bi-vocational—they lead and work at Exit 59 in various capacities, but they hold other jobs (ranging from quality control in a coffee roastery to business and sales, to education and photography) to support themselves financially. This way of organizing church leadership accomplishes a few key things:

  • All of us have the opportunity and responsibility to use our gifts in the church
  • The majority of the church's monetary resources can be used for ministry
  • We all figure out together what it means to be called to the Great Commission while supporting ourselves in an 8-5 working world

Basically, we live to see our gifts, passions, and callings intermingle—to watch the lines between them blur and dissolve. All our work and all our relationships, both inside and outside the church, are meant to draw people into an understanding of Christ’s love.

IV. Calling, Equipping, and Sending

We want to see people doing the things God has put within them to do. We call every person at Exit 59 to be engaged in the ministries of the church, both for the church and for the communities of Grant County.

Our larger group of churches is called the Movement of Alliance Communities for a reason: we live in anticipation of God’s call on our lives. He may move us in any of three ways:

  • God may call us to stay in Grant County as a part of Exit 59, loving and serving the community locally.
  • God may call us to leave this area to love and serve another community in a different church.
  • God may call us in the form of a team to plant a church within the Movement in another community, whether nearby, in another state, or in another country.