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THE FOUNDATION

- The element that brings about reconciliation, healing, and restoration is Jesus Christ, our common Head, and his love and compassion as we allow it to be ministered through us. He is the only true Foundation on which we can be successfully established. Jesus alone is the center and foundation of what it means to be a Christian and a part of God's Family in the fullest sense. He alone shows us the Father and what it means to be and to live as a child of God, spiritually begotten of the Father through baptism and the holy Spirit. With the Father, Jesus sends the holy Spirit to bring to our minds all that he taught us and to empower us for his ministry through us to the world around us. We, the Church, are called to be and to be seen as the Ministering Body of Christ. It is because we have forgotten this central truth that the Body of Christ is so divided.

THE KEY

- The key to the ministry of reconciliation, healing, and restoration of all things in Christ is to be "Christ where we are." "Christ where we are" means CHRist In Service To where we are. If we function with this attitude and on this foundation, we will see more and more of the Family of God coming together in unity as the sign of hope that the world can believe and accept. The world needs to know that Jesus is not an ism or a label or a denomination but is a Person who is alive and active today in those who bear his Name and are Christened or anointed with the same anointing of the holy Spirit as he was. What a call! What a challenge! This won't happen overnight, but it is happening. Old foundations are crumbling all around us. God is laying a new and surer foundation in each of us who will let him.

The blood of our natural family flows through us and gives us the right to reconciliation, healing, and restoration with the members of our own family. Stronger than that is the Blood of Jesus Christ that flows through all of us who have been reconciled to the Father and have become his Family because Jesus shed his blood for us. It is this Blood-relationship that makes us truly one in Christ. We do not always agree with our natural family members, nor do they with us. We do not always understand each other, though we must try to. What is important is that we are family! This is more so with God's Family. What the world needs to see is that, beneath all the labels that Christians use to distinguish and sometimes isolate one another, there is a Family moving and ministering together in unity as the Family of God, made one under God our Father, in Jesus our Brother, and through the holy Spirit, the Bond of Love, Power, and Unity who holds us all together.

Jesus began his life and ministry in and through a family. May we work together to become the Family of God that he came to establish.

"Preparing People To Fulfill Christ's Vision"