WHAT WE BELIEVE

We believe God's love story is presented in the Scriptures. Scripture is the norm of our faith and life. We believe Scripture is our primary source of knowing what God has done, is doing, and is yet to do. Scripture should be faithfully examined in a community.

We believe God has been revealed through history. The church is connected by a great web of people who wrestled with God. We believe our communal history has much to teach us about who God is today. Martin Luther, a theologian from the ancient church, called upon the church to depend solely on God for our salvation, in lieu of what we say or what we do. Luther called the church to always be reforming and never become too comfortable. We believe our tiny corner of the kingdom can be a challenge.

We believe the Holy Spirit is still at work. The same Spirit who hovered over creation and raised Jesus from the dead is the Spirit that moves in us and among us today. We believe the Spirit is how God stays close: opening up Scripture, stirring our conscience, and holding a scattered, imperfect church together. We don't always know how to name what the Spirit is doing. We just try to stay open to it.

We believe God is bigger than we can fully know. Our words, our theology, even our best metaphors can only point toward who God is; they can't contain it. We believe faith is less about having God figured out and more about trusting the God who has been revealed, even in what we don't understand.

We believe we were made in the image of God and made for love. We believe we bend that love inward more often than not, hurting ourselves and each other. We call that sin. We believe we cannot fix it on our own. We believe Jesus is God's answer to it: his life, death, and resurrection are how God restores what we cannot. And we believe that restoring work isn't finished. We believe self-giving love, the kind we see in Jesus, is what we're being drawn into: not just something done for us, but something we're invited to join.

WE BELIEVE EVERYONE DESERVES A PLACE AT THE TABLE

We believe God's love is not limited by the boundaries people create. As an affirming Christian community, we strive to do more than welcome people; we seek to embrace them, honoring their dignity, listening to their story, and letting their presence change us.

We believe LGBTQIA+ people are fully beloved by God and fully part of the life of the Church.

We stand in solidarity with communities whose voices have been silenced, marginalized, or oppressed, including but not limited to LGBTQIA+ people, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, women and people impacted by restrictions on reproductive rights, and others threatened by oppressive systems. Embracing the "other" can be difficult, especially when it asks us to move beyond our own comfort. But we don't believe everyone needs to be the same for a community to be whole. We want Jacob's Porch to be a place where people are not merely tolerated, but genuinely known, valued, and embraced.

WHY JESUS?

Thomas Aquinas once said, "To those who believe, no explanation is necessary. To those who do not, no explanation will suffice." It is hard to explain why Jesus matters, especially to someone who has never heard the story. But we keep telling it anyway. That is a pretty extraordinary claim to build a life on, and we want to spend our lives figuring out what it means.

Following Jesus does not give us an answer to every question. Faith can be confusing, difficult, beautiful, and sometimes leave us with more questions than we started with. We don't see that as a failure. Like Jacob wrestling with God, we believe there is room in faith to wrestle, wonder, doubt, and even disagree. Jesus does not ask us to have everything figured out before we follow him. He invites us into a relationship with a God who is already at work.

Our faith, then, is not dependent on having all the right answers. It is rooted in the God who knows us and loves us. We follow Jesus not because we have mastered faith, but because we believe he has something to show us about God, about ourselves, and about the world around us. We are still figuring it out, and we think that's part of following Jesus.

The rule

Every community develops its own way of living together. For Jacob’s Porch, that guide is The Rule. Inspired by the rules of communities like the Franciscans and Dominicans, our Rule gives us a vocabulary for describing who we are, what we value, and how we hope to live together. It is not a complete statement of Christian belief or a blueprint for how everyone should follow Jesus. Instead, it is a reflection of our particular expression of the Christian faith at Ohio State, shaped by the people who have called Jacob’s Porch home and the ways we continue to wrestle with what it means to follow Jesus together. You can find the rule here.