Our Family Traits

We believe that the local church is designed to function as a family. Every family has its own style, rhythms, and core values—the things that characterize the identity of the family. We have identified five “family traits” that shape our life and minsitry. By God’s grace we hope to be a church family marked by these values.

Gospel-Centered

What Jesus accomplished through his death and resurrection is so powerful that it restores sinful people into right relationship with God. It continually affects and transforms every area of our lives. Christianity is not about mere rules, advice, or simply becoming a better person. A gospel-centered church understands that change of any kind, especially authentic heart transformation, cannot happen apart from the gospel of grace. A gospel-centered church focuses on the gospel in all areas of the spiritual life of the church – prayer, teaching, worship, discipleship, justice – all of this happens by the grace of God available because of the sacrificial death of Jesus to save sinners from death to life. Tim Keller puts it this way, "The gospel is not the ABCs of the Christian life, but the A to Z."

Expositional Preaching

Expositional preaching is essential to the health and strength of a local church. This is why we are committed to regularly preaching through books of the Bible in an expository manner. David Helm writes that, “Expositional preaching is empowered preaching that rightfully submits the shape and emphasis of the sermon to the shape and emphasis of a biblical text.” In establishing the centrality and priority of the Word of God, the church grows deeper in their love and understanding of the God of the Word. A sermon is expositional if its content and intent are controlled by the content and intent of a particular passage of Scripture. Mark Dever describes expositional preaching as “preaching that takes for the point of a sermon the point of a particular passage of Scripture.” This means that our aim in preaching is to say what the passage says in order for the sermon to accomplish in our listeners exactly what God is seeking to accomplish through the chosen passage of his Word.

Meaningful Membership

The Christian life is fundamentally relational in nature. Relationships require commitment to flourish. At Legacy Church, membership means being part of a family. It is a group of different people, with different personalities, different experiences, and different giftings who share one identity in one Lord, one faith, and one baptism. This family is loved and led by biblically qualified leaders who work to proclaim Jesus’ teaching, call men to Jesus’ mission, and guard the purity of His bride, the church. By becoming a member at Legacy Church, you are joining a family - people willing to celebrate with you when things are good, cry with you when things are bad, and to encourage you and lovingly stir you to remain steadfast especially when you are tempted to stray. Membership is a formal relationship between a local church and a Christian, characterized by the church’s affirmation and oversight of a Christian’s discipleship, and the Christian’s submission to living out his or her discipleship in the care of the church. Membership helps us to see who we are accountable to and responsible for. Church membership must be a priority for Christians because God has not only called us into a covenantal relationship with himself, but also with others. This means a church is taking specific responsibility for a Christian and a Christian for a church.

Missional Mindset

We believe that all Christians are to have a missionary mindset. God is a sending God. God the Father sent his Son into the world to save sinners from death to life and the Son sends his Church into the world as his ambassadors. Therefore, the love of Christ compels us to be reconciled to God and then be his agents of reconciliation in the world. God is making his appeal through us to be reconciled to God (2 Cor. 5:17-21). Because we have been united with God through Jesus Christ, we are now partners with him in his mission to seek and save the lost. To be missional is to be aware of what God is doing in the world around us and seeking to partner with him in what he is doing. This means that we are disciples, making disciples. Practically this looks like a family of missionaries living with gospel intentionality in our everyday lives (Matt. 28:18-20). For many, this is a radical shift from thinking that the church is a service they attend or a club to which they belong. By God's grace, we are God's people, on God's mission, for God's glory.

Multiplying Churches

We are passionate about church planting because we are passionate about Jesus. We want to see Bellingham, Whatcom County, the Pacific Northwest, and all nations saturated with the gospel. We believe the most effective way this will happen is through churches planting churches. As the gospel continually breaks out and the kingdom is continually expanding, we aim to be a church planting church. Our goal is to plant new, healthy, like-minded churches. This means that we are committed to investing time, finances, and energy into continually developing leaders. From the beginning our entire church functions as a training center so that as Jesus calls men to the work of planting new churches we can partner with Him in equipping, resourcing, sending, and supporting church planters.