Common Life at
St Basil’s
Our shared framework for life
The Common Life is a framework for how we want to live: four priorities to organise our lives around. Everyone at St Basil’s is invited to embody these values and, in doing so, help us become the church we are called to be in this place and at this time.
God’s Presence
Being Spirit-filled people is our unique contribution to the world – He is our distinctiveness (Exodus 33:16). We aim to to live in a way that consistently welcomes God's presence in our lives. We cultivate this way of life by immersing ourselves in the story of God in the Bible, being a people who are hungry to pray, pursue holiness as an adventure and worship as our highest calling. We long to be a people filled to overflowing with God’s empowering presence wherever we go, walking intimately with Jesus each and every day and who are marked out by the gifts and fruit of Spirit. In Him “we live and move and have our being” Acts 17:28
Deep Formation
The beauty of the gospel is not just seeing salvation as an event that sets us free from our sin by grace alone but the adventure of an ongoing journey of maturing in that freedom as Jesus forms himself in us. We long to be a people deeply formed by Jesus: being transformed from one degree of glory to the next. However, we recognise that life in the modern world is conspiring to keep us perpetually spiritually immature so we are pushing back against this backdrop of unintentional spiritual formation and instead we are setting out on an intentional counter-formative journey into spiritual maturity. We long to become apprentices of Jesus, learning to follow the way of Jesus in our everyday lives.
Loving Community
The church is called to be a community of people who act as a sign, instrument and foretaste of the kingdom of God* in the world; recognisable by and famous for our love for one another (John 13:35). After all, at the heart of God is community: the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit – a dance of mutual love and submission. We hope to be recognisable for our hospitality; welcoming one another and strangers as if they were Christ himself. We want to be known for our generosity as we share our time and resources so that “no-one is in need” (Acts 2). And we aim to inhabit a life of service that Jesus himself modelled; who, though actually in nature God, humbled himself, took the position of a servant and emptied himself out for us: even to the point of death on a cross. If every fibre of Jesus’ being – in life and in death – was orientated toward serving others and raising others up, then we want every fibre of our church to look the same. Anything less will be an abdication of our calling.
Imaginative Mission
We believe the gospel is good news for the whole of society: that the church is called to join in with God’s great mission to renew and heal the world and nudge it bit by bit toward shalom. We are utterly convinced that – because of the truth we live out of and the power we live with – the church should be the most imaginative and creative community of people on the earth. We want to live with a hope-filled, prophetic imagination for the world around us, daring to dream that his kingdom could come in Devon as it is in heaven. We want to be gospel-fuelled artists who paint a picture of what could be and not just reflect what is. With this conviction in our bones, we want to live as “sent ones”: embodying gospel hope everyday, everywhere so that people come to know Jesus, cycles of injustice and marginalisation and poverty are broken and the lonely are set into family (Psalm 68:6).