How We “Do” Church
Our Markers (a.k.a. our philosophy)
Watershed’s mission statement describes our community as a church awakening, struggling, and loving together as if a different world is possible today.
Our markers are the big ideas that shape the way we show up theologically and ethically as we work out our mission in the world. Think of them as tools or technologies that reflect both the ways that Watershed marks our broader community and - perhaps more importantly - the ways our broader community marks Watershed.
Finding Kinship
Kinship names the sense in which spiritual community can act as a kind of chosen family while capturing all the messiness and complexity caught up in any notion of family. We’re better together and yet our togetherness invites a host of contradictions and curiosities that must be met with gentleness and grace.
Pursuing Growth
Growth is neither linear nor uniform. It suggest and ongoing journey of discovery and development that is inclusive of the disappointments and divestments made along the way. For Watershed, growth invites embracing curiosity where we once sought certainty. And growth insists upon holding a proximity to contradiction without reducing it to an opposition.
Creating Change
As Octavia Butler reminds us, “all that you touch you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.” Watershed’s embrace of change names both the divinely inspired creative impulse imbued in all of humanity and the emancipatory necessity of never allowing what is to eclipse what ought to be.
The Post Evangelical Collective
Watershed is a Post-Evangelical Church, understanding itself to exist in the wake of American Evangelicalism and in the infancy of what is still emerging in Evangelicalism’s wake. It may be years, decades even, before our spiritual lineage is better defined. In the meantime, you can learn more about Post-Evangelicalism by visiting the home of the Post-Evangelical Collective.