Our Mission Isn’t Actually Ours

What Are We? — Part 2

Here’s something that surprises people: Checkpoint Church didn’t write its own mission statement.

We borrowed it.

The United Methodist Church has a governing document called the Book of Discipline—it’s a real, physical book, republished every four years, containing the polity, theology, and rules that hold the whole denomination together.

It opens with a mission statement that belongs to every UMC church on the planet, Checkpoint included:

To make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

That’s it. That’s the assignment I was handed, along with every other UMC pastor, when Checkpoint was planted back in 2020.

What makes it ours is the where.

Checkpoint specifically is not trying to transform the world in general — we’re trying to transform the world of nerds, geeks, and gamers, because that’s the world we know and the world we love.

We want to see a corner of the internet that’s better than the one we found.

Not a nicer version of what already exists online, but something genuinely different: a place built on welcome instead of gatekeeping, on curiosity instead of cynicism.

So when people ask what Checkpoint is “trying to do,” the honest answer is: the same thing every Methodist church is trying to do. We just happen to be doing it through Discord servers and Nerdy Sermons instead of stained glass and Sunday bulletins.

Next up: the three covenant statements we wrote ourselves — the part of our mission that is uniquely Checkpoint’s.