Who is Saint John?

Roots

Where are we coming from?

  • What the Bible says, God says.

  • We are a confessional church and embrace the ancient ecumenical creeds.

  • We are presbyterian and reformed and, as such, embrace the Westminster Standards. We require our officers to adhere to these standards but do not require our members to adhere to the same.

  • We are a member church of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA).

  • Click here for an explanation of our church name

Mission and Vision

Where are we going?

Our mission is to proclaim and embody the gospel of Jesus in the cultures of urban Cincinnati through planting neighborhood churches.

  • We exist to preach Jesus in all that we do. We want to preach him from the pulpit and from our lives.

  • We exist to apply the gospel of Jesus to all of life and imitate him as we follow the way of the cross.

  • The gospel is the good news that God saves sinners through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

  • We seek to be significantly engaged in the many cultures of the city in order to influence all of life with the hope of the gospel.

  • We do this wherever the Lord has planted us beginning in the urban core.

Our vision is to connect the disconnected to Jesus, His people, and His mission.

Values

What do we love?

  • We were created to know and love God. But because of our sin we don’t really know God and we reject him in ignorance. So we believe that hearing, understanding, and believing the good news of Jesus and his kingdom is the key to knowing who God really is. For this reason we seek to preach Jesus in every sermon, make Him the center of our worship, and bring one another back to the gospel in counseling.

  • We were created to make stuff. God is a maker. He made the world. He made the heavens, earth, and sea. Then he made culture. He planted a garden. He put mankind in the garden to imitate him by being cultivators. Our calling is to take the raw materials of our world and make a culture that is beautiful, useful, and full of blessing. Our problem is that our culture has become warped because our fellowship with the creator is broken. Jesus came to transform not only individual lives, but also to transform culture by reconciling all things to God.

  • God created us to grow and change. Sin causes us to get stuck in destructive patterns. We value the gospel taking root in our lives in such a way that we change to become more like Jesus. We pursue personal spiritual growth, family growth, and church growth. We have a healthy suspicion of the status quo because we know that we have “not arrived” as people or as a church.

  • God created us to be part of a body. Sin isolates us. But none of us are self sufficient. We need one another. Jesus unites us to the Father and to each other in one body. For this reason every person is needed. We all have gifts, experiences, resources, and perspectives that make us irreplaceable in the life of the church.

  • God created us to be fruitful and multiply. Our sin disconnects us from the source of life. We do not bear fruit and we don’t pass good things along to others. But as we understand Jesus and abide in Him, he gives us His Spirit and causes all good things to multiply. So pursue raising up new Christians, new leaders, new pastors, and new churches. We value the kingdom of God multiplying on every level.

Practices

How are we doing it?

  • We gather to worship the Lord every Sunday through participating in the ancient practices described in Scripture and maintained throughout the history of the church. We pray, preach, give, sing, and celebrate the sacraments. All of this is centered on the person and work of Jesus.

  • We gather together in groups and classes to study. We study God, his ways, his people, his world, and his mission. We study the Bible, theology, church history, culture, and ministry in order to grow in our love for God and our neighbor.

  • We gather together to pray. On our own we simply do not have the resources to advance God’s kingdom. We are needy and fragile people who need the Lord’s mercy and power. So we gather regularly to call upon the one who is able to supply every need according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.

  • We gather together to share life with one another. We were made to function as a vital member of a body. We were made to belong. We are uniquely made with gifts, experiences, and a story that’s designed to be a help to others. We were never meant to do life alone.