WHAT WE're About


Emmaus Way is an inclusive, Christian community captivated by the Gospel. 


We value the witness of scripture, locate ourselves within the historical path

of the church, and pattern our shared life after the person of Christ while

unambiguously welcoming all to shape the community we are becoming together.


The core of our community life and practice is an Open Eucharist Table, where we find a vision of God's kin-dom that isn't smug or scarce, but instead radically hospitable and rooted in love. 

Jesus’s table “embodied egalitarianism, disrupted the pleasures of hierarchy, and domination, and abolished the etiquette of empire” (M. Shawn Copeland). And so, in trying to follow Jesus’s example, we are a queer affirming, anti-racist, anti-hierarchical community continually striving to live

more and more fully into those realities together.


WhAT BINDS US TOGETHER

The Co-Ministers' Liturgy is our Rite of Belonging and it expresses the mutual commitments of our life together as a Christian community. We use the language of co-minister to describe those who call this community their home since we are all active participants (along with our staff and lay leadership) in the work of fulfilling this highest and most essential expression of our life together. 


AS CO-MINISTERS, WE VOW...

To imitate Christ in thought, word, deed, and affection. 


To foster proximity and mutuality among one another, seeking

beauty and abundance in the diversity of God's Kingdom.


To pursue simplicity and sustainability in our relationships

to time, resources, and environment. 


To come alongside God's redemptive work in Durham, as partners

and participants in the embodied justice of beloved community. 


To cultivate a communal life centered in practices of prayer, 

contemplation, intentional conversation, spiritual discernment, 

creative liturgy, and dialogical study of scripture. 


To shape our life together around the radical hospitality

reflected in our Open Table.

What gives us life

We're always trying to pay attention more fully to where God is at hand and at work in our midst. And we've often found our clearest glimpses of God's enlivening presence through communal, dialogical encounters with the arts, with children, and with scripture.

Our shared experiences engaging artistic complexity, childlike wonder, and scriptural interpretation give shape and vibrancy to our lived experience of the Christian life, and help keep us open to the surprising work of God.

What calls us forth

As Christians, our lives are devoted to the work of God.  When we participate in this work to which we are called, we engage in mission


At Emmaus Way, we understand our mission as something that engulfs the whole of our lives. It is not something "extra" we do, but absolutely essential to who we are. We enact our mission in our jobs, when we offer hospitality to others or practice friendship, when we work for justice in our neighborhoods and city, when we speak of God's grace, and when we embody that grace in forgiveness.


In this mission, we also recognize that we cannot (nor are we called to) do everything. As a community, we have embraced some key missional partnerships, borne out of our friendships in the Durham community. Presently these missional partners are Durham CAN and Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham.