Doctrinal Statement

 Doctrinal Statement: Divine portion

• We believe there is ultimate source/origin, beyond name, beyond label, beyond anthropic.
• We believe all that is, was, and shall be is of ultimate source/origin.

Doctrinal Statement: People/Divine portion

• We believe the divine is a source of opportunity to experience in this realm a spirited intention of love, unity in diversity, and justice.
• We recognize the inadequacy of words to completely cover the spirited intention in its practical expression.
• We recognize embodiment and its evolution as the work in progress for the manifest experience of the spirited intention.
• We recognize the need for language to guide embodiment and its evolution for the manifest experience of the spirited intention and reserve the right to continually clarify and update any detailed expression, written, oral, or otherwise, to better assist those processes.
• We recognize that any boundary creates unavoidable exclusion and believe divine energies lead us to create boundaries that support the spirited intention.
• We believe all human beings play a part in contribution to the spirited intention.
• We believe there are seeds of the spirited intention in the many traditions of humanity, secular and sacred and that we are tasked to collect those seeds for the evolution that supports the spirited intention.

An overview of TCNA’s values (axiology) and spiritual and ethical philosophy:

• We are libertarian in nature.
• We are interested in the impact of ideas and their implications for people.
• We believe in building consensus.
• We embrace the idea of power ‘with’ and power ‘to’ as our guiding leadership philosophy.
• We understand the meaning of terms used will necessarily change from person to person, but that there is a ‘commons’ (community shared definitions) that we all share and that the organization is primarily interested in the commons; and deals with a person's personal space only as needed for its relationship to the commons.
• We understand the relationship between the person and the commons is dynamic and sometimes unclear, and lean toward how the commons can support personal liberties.
• We recognize that "we are scripture" is really the bottom line...we are consciousness.
• We value safety, the creation of a safe space where individual expression is respected.
• We aspire for our ministers to lead by example and guide by the ‘light’ of their life.
• We recognize each person's ability to bring something to the table and we work to find that place where what the person brings supports our common interest.
• We are attempting to create a new kind of orthodoxy whose guardrails will hold over time; yet we recognize the importance of building an orthodox framework with a necessary and sufficient degree of elasticity that will allow for evolution in thought as truth is revealed and emerging over time.
• We seek to have ministers operating in this vein, this energetic vein as a requirement. It is a "feeling" an inner ‘knowing’ an awakening of ‘consciousness’ that is the ‘Christ’ within each individual.