Core Values

The Church Within A Church Movement (CWACM) values Community, Faith and Justice. We are passionate about bringing these elements together in our Core Values, which require actions of justice through relationship-building that tear down walls that privilege some and marginalize and exclude others. We hold these Core Values equally and concurrently.

Community

• We gather as community: members and friends valuing relationships, support and connection.
• We seek to gain trust as community, that we may create and maintain safe spaces where all who gather may name and heal their own wounds caused by injustice and marginalization.
• We heal so that we can build community with our best selves from a place of wholeness and health.
• We seek to act non-hierarchically and inclusively. CWACM Community Meetings are open and all are welcome. All who gather have voice and place.
• We endeavor to embrace shared leadership in all facets of our community work.
• We make decisions ever aware of seeking justice and the common good. We reason together; listen and speak our realities; then, when we have achieved consensus according to the CWACM model, we act together as a community.
• We affirm the ongoing need for individual and community accountability, mutually supporting each other as we endeavor to live and move with integrity.
• We recognize that we are still wrestling with the complexities of being an inclusive community, including gatherings, economics and other life situations.
• We recognize that we are diverse and are in different places in our respective journeys. We will seek to gather, learn, share, trust and grow, both individually and collectively.
• We will be guided by principles of nonviolence, compassion, inclusion, equity and justice.

Faith

• CWACM is an expansive, anti-oppression community honoring a diversity of spiritual, religious and philosophical truths and their fullest expressions.
• We understand faith as broader than a theological word.
• Faith is important to the community. Spaces may be created by the community for people to share their experiences of faith, mystery and questions.
• Individually and collectively we search for meaning and purpose and therein find our own truths.
• CWACM continues to offer Extraordinary Ordination in a Christian tradition.

Justice

• The CWACM was born in 2002 as a response to overt discrimination toward “gays and lesbians” in the UMC. In the years that followed, members of the CWACM have worked to broaden their own understandings to include transgender, bisexual, lesbian, gay, gender non-conforming, non-binary and queer persons.
• CWACM seeks to engage and dismantle injustice of any kind, including, but not limited to, white privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege, economic privilege, environmental injustices and colonialism in the forms of fear, hate, greed, arrogance, domination and violence.
• We learn, educate, challenge, act and pray for justice.
• We know that injustice is systemic and exists to privilege some and to control others, thus causing harm.
• We will hold our spaces equitably, aware of how differently people experience privilege and marginalization.
• Because institutional, interpersonal, and personal racism remain prevalent in our society and our world, we dedicate ourselves to solidarity with our Black, Indigenous and People of Color siblings.
• White people in CWACM will educate ourselves and other white people; we will listen to the voices of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, and be led by their wisdom. We will caucus monthly, encouraging and challenging each other on the journey.
• CWACM will stand firm as we all struggle to be sure that Black, Indigenous, and People of Color lives matter in all aspects of life – relationships, work, play, health, housing, interactions with law enforcement, mental health, and in the core fact of our shared humanity.
• We are an anti-racist Movement, as documented in our Statement of Anti Racist Intent and The Pledge that see racism as a foundational block in the wall of "isms."
• We have a Community Values Statement to which we are all accountable, so that everyone may feel respected and valued at all CWACM gatherings. [At this time, that statement is under review.]

~ Affirmed by the national Coordinating Team on August 16, 2012

~ Revised by the CWACM Coordinating Team on May 11, 2019

~ Revised by the CWACM Community on September 21, 2021