TNHome

Tierra Nueva (New Earth) is an ecumenical ministry located in Burlington, Washington, that seeks to share the Good News of God's liberation in Jesus Christ with migrant farmworkers, new immigrants, and permanent Hispanic residents in Western Washington.

We are dedicated to proclaiming the Good News of God's reign (on earth as it is in heaven) with the oppressed for our mutual liberation, healing, empowerment, and total salvation.

Tierra Nueva envisions a shepherding ministry that seeks after lost sheep until they are found (Luke 15:4). We have structured our ministries to:

• seek after lost sheep until they are found--through Skagit County Jail Ministry, migrant chaplaincy, and Tierra Nueva Honduras.

• care for, defend, and protect--through the Family Support Center.

• gather, feed and heal--through our English and Spanish faith communities, bilingual jail services and healing services.

• equip and send out--through the People's Seminary events and courses.

Recently our staff gathered to envision Tierra Nueva’s collective calling and define our core values. I hope that you will hear our hearts and be drawn deeper into God’s heart, insofar as we reflect God’s unfailing love for the world.

Hosting God’s Presence is our highest value. We receive God’s love and are immersed in the Holy Spirit when we pray, worship, contemplate Jesus, meditate on Scripture, and minister to each other. When we love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength we experience peace, joy, and revelation and are empowered for ministry in places of great darkness and need.

Connecting people with Jesus is our second value. Hearing good news and receiving God’s love inspires us to help others meet Jesus. Through dialogical bible study, walking with people in their troubles, advocating for them before the powers, and ministering healing, deliverance, and prayer, our hope is that others will experience God’s transforming love.

Reading Scripture with Jesus reflects our commitment to finding Good News in Scripture through prayerful study and dialogical interaction with the poor, each other, and the Saints that precede and surround us. As the Father focused the disciples’ attention on the transfigured Jesus—over Moses (Torah) and Elijah (Prophets) —so we seek direction from the resurrected Jesus, who on the Emmaus Road showed from Moses and the prophets his way of combating evil through the redemptive suffering of his cross. We welcome the Holy Spirit whom Jesus sends to help us interpret and live the Scriptures daily.

Empowering disciples of Jesus is fourth on our list—we emphasize our longing to see people from the margins (jails, gangs, migrant worker community) and mainstream raised up as leaders. We love that Jesus is a friend of sinners who calls fishermen, tax-collectors, and zealots from backwater Galilee. We seek to be a community where people are discerning their calling, clarifying their gifts, and joining a movement that announces and makes visible the Kingdom of God.

Bridging divergent worlds is our fifth value. We strategically bring together people and movements that are separated, on behalf of society’s least. We seek to connect the margins with the mainstream, the poor with the privileged, the social justice and pacifist Christians with the charismatic and evangelical body of Christ, the streets with the academy, sustainable farming efforts with inner-city ministry. We believe it takes a whole body of Christ to see breakthrough at the most extreme places. We are committed to experiencing mutual liberation and transformation with the oppressed and we have lots to learn from people in every camp. We long to see God’s family reconciled, receiving from each other through respectful listening, hospitality, community—-but first and foremost through receiving God’s Spirit that adopts us by Grace into Christ’s body.

We invite you to journey with us as we seek and find the Gospel that has the power to save, heal, liberate, deliver, and bring total transformation. Join us so we can see together the signs of God's kingdom: faith found or renewed, strangers welcomed, addicts recovered, prisoners released, the sick and broken healed, ordinary people empowered for ministry.

Read about our ministries. Come to our events. Worship with us. You are welcome at this banquet table!

Bob Ekblad, Executive Director

www.bobekblad.com

Tierra Nueva • PO Box 161, Burlington, WA 98233 • 360-755-0768 info@tierra-nueva.org