COMMON GROUND MONTGOMERY
The mission of CGM is to glorify God by being instrumental in redeeming impoverished and under-resourced communities through spiritual and community development.
In a nutshell, Common Ground Montgomery has as its goal neighborhood community re-development. While many organizations are actively involved through various initiatives and programs in serving our communities, we are seeking to implement a strategy that fosters long-term transformation in a distinctively Christian way.
Our strategy is to move into and become part of the fabric of under-resourced neighborhoods in order to serve and help create, develop, and empower local leaders, and to build healthy families through biblical ‘discipleship’. We believe this includes the ‘life-on-life’ training of people to be what God has designed them to be as the ‘image of God’. This ‘life on life’ strategy is what we believe to be the pattern of Jesus as he shared and invested His time and life into real relationships with people. By sharing our lives with and entering into the lives of others we will seek to build healthy leaders for all walks of life for our communities. We will have many ministries of mercy demonstrating the care and love of God, but it is our ultimate goal to develop the godly leaders necessary to lead our communities.
Our ministry will have a ‘holistic’ expression of service. That is, we will minister to the whole person, both physically and spiritually. To do this, we will have to address the needs of a community: spiritual, physical, health-care, economic, housing, educational, and recreational. We don’t believe that programs, in themselves, will be all that effective for long term transformation (though we will have numerous programs!). In other words, it is through relationships that this transformation can happen: relationship with God, which brings real heart change, and relationships with others by which we grow and use our God given resources together in a community.
We believe the Church specifically (and really any godly society) has an obligation to love and take care of the poor and oppressed. As God has shown us mercy and justice in the “Good News” of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, we are to show the same mercy and justice on behalf of others as a visible manifestation of His Kingdom on earth. We are seeking very intentional ways to love and take care of those who are poor and marginalized in our society as well as those who are suffering various forms of injustice and oppression. We want to do this through ‘responsible caring’ and in ways that will bring long-term transformation, rather than enabling current lifestyle patterns.