The Fringe Church

Hospitality and Kinship: 

No matter what your story is, we've all been there. We've all felt the ache. We've felt disconnected with those around us and our Creator. We've all felt the fringe, the margin and like we were on the outside... At the Fringe Church we embrace a raw, authentic and transformative hospitality where the table is big enough for everyone. Everyone deserves to feel a deep sense of family, belonging and community no matter where they're at on their journey. Here we discover not just church, but kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it.

Greg Boyle founder of Homeboy Industries said, “The self cannot survive without love, and the self, starved of love, dies. The absence of self-love is shame, "just as cold is the absence of warmth." 

Everything is Spiritual:

We believe in a un-compartmentalized spiritual life, where everything is spiritual. That everything we do, say or think all the time is deeply spiritual. We believe in the importance of a world-view where God is already at work in the world and our call is to join Him in what He is already doing. 

Kingdom Now:

We affirm the truth and power of Jesus' life, death and resurrection and believe these realities have not only future implications but present as well. We believe we have been called to join God in the here and now in putting the world back together. We are not just waiting to die and go to heaven but our call is to bring heaven to earth here and now. Luke 20-21: Jesus, grilled by the Pharisees on when the kingdom of God would come, answered, “The kingdom of God doesn’t come by counting the days on the calendar. Nor when someone says, ‘Look here!’ or, ‘There it is!’ And why? Because God’s kingdom is already among you.”

No Us and Them:

Our dream at the Fringe Church is that we will participate with our Creator in the restoration of the world and the end of the "us and them" world view.  The strategy of Jesus is not centered in taking the right stand on issues, but rather in standing in the right place—with the outcast and those relegated to the margins. We will stand with the belligerent, the surly, and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear. Our dream at the Fringe Church is that we will participate with our Creator in the restoration of the world and the end of the "us and them" world view.

Radical Inclusion:

We are committed to tearing down any walls that divide us. We've given up on the illusion that some lives matter less than others. We long for a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor, the outcast, addicted and ex-felon have had to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it. Soon we imagine, with God, a circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased.