What We Are About:
Our City, World, Faith, Vision, Church Planting Network, & Church Planters
In the Gospel of John we learn of a pool in Jerusalem where great numbers of the blind, the lame, the paralyzed used to come hoping to be healed; the pool was called Bethesda, which means “House of Mercy.” When Jesus arrived that day he brought healing and power and mercy. We believe that when the resurrected Christ arrives today he does the same, by forming a people into a community of mercy. We begin to see ourselves, not as the disinterested observers of a story, but as participants in the Great Story of His Love – as those in need of his healing and strength and mercy. As grateful and ongoing recipients of his mercy we become ministers of mercy.
Our City
New Haven, the second largest city in Connecticut and the sixth largest in New England, is a remarkable and delightful place, sometimes referred to as “The Greatest Small City in America.”
With a population of 135,000 and more than 850,000 in the metro area, it may be the only city in America with equal representation of the country’s three largest ethnic groups (32% Black, 30% White, 30% Hispanic, 5% Asian, 3% Native American/Other).
Paradoxically, New Haven is both one of the wealthiest and one of the most impoverished cities in New England, with all the complex challenges and hardships facing the modern urban community.
As a new church for the metro New Haven community, our aim is to cultivate a “beautiful community by devoting ourselves to the doctrine of unity in diversity as a gospel imperative … becoming opponents of injustice, racism, and oppression” (Irwyn Ince, The Beautiful Community). Our hope and prayer is to glorify God in and through our city’s diversity, while also serving as the hands and feet of Jesus to love and serve our neighbors.
Our World
Jesus was a first century Middle Eastern man. He didn’t fit our Western or North American social norms. Yet Jesus came for us all, both then and now. When he invites us, “Come, follow me,” he invites us into the love he has for the whole world.
We believe that “God is both the Creator and the Judge of all men. We therefore should share his concern for justice and reconciliation throughout human society and for the liberation of men and women from every kind of oppression. Because men and women are made in the image of God, every person, regardless of race, religion, colour, culture, class, sex or age, has an intrinsic dignity because of which he or she should be respected and served, not exploited. . . . The message of salvation implies also a message of judgment upon every form of alienation, oppression and discrimination, and we should not be afraid to denounce evil and injustice wherever they exist. When people receive Christ they are born again into his kingdom and must seek not only to exhibit but also to spread its righteousness in the midst of an unrighteous world. The salvation we claim should be transforming us in the totality of our personal and social responsibilities” (Lausanne Covenant).
Our Faith
A member church of the ECO movement of Christ-centered presbyterians, House of Mercy shares ECO’s vision and passion: “Imagine worldwide, millions of people linked to the surprising goodness of God, loved through tangible acts of kindness, lifted by the compelling good news of Jesus, and lavishly adopted into a new and better kind of family.”
Together with Christians of all times and places, our religious faith is summarized by the ancient creeds (the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed) and modern and global ecumenical statements of faith like The Barmen Declaration and the Lausanne Covenant; not by whatever White “Christian Nationalist” perversions to the Christian faith we may now be experiencing in our particular time and place (cf. these powerful books).
The two central mysteries of the Christian faith (the triune nature of God, and the nature of Jesus Christ as both truly God and truly human), together with the “Essential Tenets” of our faith are well expressed in our denomination’s foundational documents, which may be found here.
Our Vision
Our vision is to be a new house church for New Haven characterized by values that we long to see more fully realized in our beloved city:
• A ”good news!” house church that lives out the beauty and truth of the Reformed tradition’s articulation of the Gospel, centering Jesus and his mercy.
• An intentionally cross-cultural house church that honors and empowers diversity, equity, and inclusion; aspiring in all things to be representative of the Kingdom’s unity-amidst-diversity.
• An egalitarian house church that celebrates and empowers God’s gifting of both women and men for all forms of service, pastoral ministry, and leadership in his Kingdom.
• An ecumenical house church that ministers in a spirit of partnership, not competition, with the other churches in the city, following in the incarnational footsteps of Christ, who came as a servant for all people.
• A house church with a prophetic voice of how the Gospel of Jesus Christ is intimately wed to loving our neighbors and redemptive social justice in shared public life.
Our Church Planting Network
House of Mercy has the privilege of being a member church in the Ethnos Network, an Association of Churches that looks to start new spaces for people to explore and connect with Jesus and what He is doing in our world, especially communities uniquely called to live in and serve the urban areas surrounding major global universities.
House of Mercy comes together with the other churches because we love, believe in, and trust each other. We share and seek to be characterized by the values of the Ethnos Network, including:
Jesus as Leader, Focus, and Message
Ministry as Incarnational Presence
Intentional Ethnic & Socioeconomic Diversity
Holistic Transformation
The Centrality of Both Heart & Mind
Bridge Building & Partnerships
Our Church Planters: Jeff and Troy Hutchinson
Jeff and Troy have worked and lived in New Haven since 2016 and have fallen in love with our city. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and raised in South Carolina, California, and Bethesda, Maryland, Jeff grew up spending his summers at his grandparents’ house in Connecticut. An Eagle Scout, he attended Duke University on a Navy ROTC Scholarship. Raised in the Episcopal Church, it was at Duke that he came to a deeper and more personal sense of Christ’s love for him, brought into a personal relationship with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit through the friendships he was making in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and through the simple motions of Bible Study, prayer, worship, and spiritual fellowship. It was also at Duke that he met his wonderful wife, Troy, a native of Raleigh, NC. They have been married for more than 36 years, and have three adult children and a wonderful son-in-law 😀.
After service as a Surface Warfare Officer in the United States Navy, Jeff was called to the ministry of the gospel, earning both his MDiv and DMin. He has served as a campus minister in Florida and as a Presbyterian pastor in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut for more than thirty years; but this current adventure, sent by both the ECO movement and the ETHNOS Network to New Haven to plant a new house church in a city he loves with friends and neighbors he is honored to know, has been his favorite season of ministry so far! Please feel free to contact him anytime!
