Our Beliefs

At Watershed, reclamation articulates our participation in the process of learning to speak of God. It describes our valuing the words of those who came before us, taking seriously their encounters and wrestlings with the reality we name as God. But it acknowledges the boundedness of their experiences, separated from our own by the distances of time and place. More specifically, the same Jesus who informed the existence of the early church, necessitating that they understand God through the lens of the cross, still speaks to us today, but in ways and means appropriate to and intelligible in our context. And so reclamation names the process of translation, engaging in a critically appreciative dialogue with those who came before us, not so we can repeat what they have said, but so that we can speak of God in fresh expressions appropriate for our time and for our place, ever informed - but never bound - by those who spoke first.

At Watershed, transformation is the ongoing choice to live outside of ourselves, in a posture of vulnerability and love towards the other. But this choice to love also then frees us to live within ourselves as well, fully free to be who God had always already created us to be. Transformation names the conviction that our being, both individually and collectively, is bound up in our ongoing process of becoming, the journey towards authenticity. By that we mean that our identities are not fixed or bound to some arbitrary definition of wholeness or humanity - such as vocation, religiosity, relationship, or net worth - but instead bound up in God, who ever-interrupts our ego-driven attempts to secure ourselves against one another, be it our families, our co-workers, or the marginalized other.

Here at Watershed, liberation means living in the world as it actually is, but loving as if we believe a different world is possible. In living in the world as it is, we prioritize the truth lived on the margins because too often it’s the powerful who tell the stories of history. By loving as if we believe a different world is possible, we differentiate between the unjust and dehumanizing narratives that enslave and the people who hold to them, working to dismantle those narratives, convinced that liberation, first for the oppressed, is also liberation for the oppressor. Our action is therefore guided by the legacy and leadership of those on the margins who have been struggling for liberation for centuries, whose lament informs our humility and whose joyful resistance in the face of injustice animates our hope