Summarizing: Assessing Church Identity

The apparent mission of the Epic church is centered on drawing in new believers, youth, minorities, and Philadelphians into the faith. They want to pave the way for a tight-knit yet diverse community. 

In my first blog post I spoke of the appearance of the website:

"A peculiar thing to note about these visuals is that they are designed to seem, in a sense, very colorful, creative, and 'cool'. Some of them even contain pop-culture references, like emojis. Even more on the subject of pop-culture, the titles of some of these recordings are direct references to popular online phenomena such as hashtags, phrases, and even memes."

This points to their focus on youth and new believers, since they are using well-known and popular references to the secular culture that non-believers are a part of and the youth is saturated with every day in social media. In the same post I made the case that, "A lot of their website then shows, shortcuts and easy access to information for new believers and people interested in becoming part of the faith". This again shows their website is not only welcoming to non-believers but also actively accommodating them. Another identity that is a big part of the Epic Church are Philadelphians as a whole, Philadelphia is a central part of their mission and what they write about in the website explicitly, under the about section, they write "WE ARE #FORPHILLY" twice, once in their belief list, and another in their introduction. This repeating line shows the church's focus on Philadelphians. Based on an assessment of other parts of the website, I wrote about a certain thing that really caught my attention during the first post of this blog:

"One last thing that really caught my attention was under their "Get Involved" section. Under this there are groups for youth and kids, showing the Epic Church is very present in engaging with younger generations. Even more interesting were their 'Life Groups'. These groups meet at a certain time a week, in a certain location, and have a certain number and type of members. These life groups are very interesting due to their nature, which is seen through their titles; there are life groups for everything from volunteering at a certain location to watching and discussing Football together."

This ties back tot he claim that the Epic Church's focus is to pave the way for a tight-knit yet diverse community. In the end, the actual mission and focus of The Epic Church as phrased by The Epic Church are the next lines:

"WE DO OUR BEST TO LOVE JESUS AND LOVE PEOPLE. WE'RE #FORPHILLY. WE BELIEVE THAT EVERY PERSON MATTERS. WE CREATE CHURCHES THAT LEAD PEOPLE TO AND THROUGH THEIR NEXT STEPS" 

In conclusion, the original evaluation of what the Epic Church's mission is seems pretty similar to what the Epic Church says about themselves. The only thing I would say is missing from my initial idea of the Epic Church's mission is the lack of the figure Jesus, which seems very important on Epic Church's stated mission and beliefs. I believe that this is missing in my initial assessment due to the lack of visuals that tie back to Jesus in their website, although he is mentioned extensively in text.

In the end, through the assesment of the website's own stated mission, I have only one thing to add to my initial claim:

"The apparent mission of the Epic church is centered on drawing in new believers, youth, minorities, and Philadelphians into the faith. They want to pave the way for a tight-knit yet diverse community centered on Jesus' teachings."