At GracePointe we are committed to our vision of Loving God, Loving Self and Loving Others. We believe this begins at home and finds it ultimate end in the four distant corners of the earth. As the old maxim wisely states, “the light that shines farthest is the one that shines the brightest at home.” We believe our mission is to share God’s love with every man, woman, girl and boy. Everyone! Everywhere!

We accept the commission of Jesus to go into all the earth proclaiming the Good News of God’s redeeming love for mankind. We believe that proclamation happens in a myriad of forms and are always seeking new and creative ways to to communicate God’s love to those near and far. As a local church we are greatly relieved to know that we are not responsible to create all the wheels on which the gospel rolls. Instead, as part of a much larger Christian family, we can enlist, partner with, and support wonderful people who are already successfully fulfilling God’s commission.

In the early days of GracePointe’s history, our leadership prayerfully, thoughtfully and humbly considered how we might most effectively maximize the effect of spreading God’s love in the world. We considered forming a classic Missions department complete with leadership, financial systems and vetting grids for the selection of partners and sponsorees. While this is certainly a proven and viable method, employed by many profoundly effective churches, we chose another route. After considering the nuances and inscape of our church family we believed that our maximum potential, i.e. financial giving and mission effect, would be achieved by this alternate way.

The way we chose was to, with prayerful discretion, bring select ministries before our congregation; ministries which we ascertained to be highly effective in Missions work. These ministries are given full access to our people and their resources. In other words, our people are not encouraged to give their financial and time resources through a middle man, i.e. GracePointe. Our people are taught and encouraged to support their local church, but to not make GracePointe the whole of their philanthropic giving.

We have found our people’s level of giving to be higher using this approach. Encouraging them to connect directly with these missions initiatives as well as their local church, itself a missions initiative, has resulted in a higher commitment and deeper buy-in.

We believe that the income of GracePointe Church is not the total dollar amount collected by our offering boxes and deposited by our 501c3 into its bank account. We believe that GracePointe’s income is rather the accumulative income of our congregants. As leaders of this spiritual community we are not simply responsible to steward the money collected in our offerings but we are responsible to encourage our people to treat every penny of their income as God’s, because that’s exactly whose it is.

Classically seen, GracePointe’s income is between one and two million dollars. Seen properly, GracePointe (which is the people not the non-profit organization) has, by some estimates, an income in excess of $50 million. Teaching responsible stewardship of this amount, exposing our people to great ministries like Keza in Africa, Danita’s Children in Haiti, and Compassion International, and not making them give through us to these, has resulted in our people giving another 30-40% beyond our 501c3′s offering box giving to the cause of Missions at home and abroad.

While we do not offer this as the solution for all churches, we are grateful that God has led us to find the most effective way to maximizing our local church’s impact upon this world.