Who We Are / What We Believe / Why It Matters
About Us
The MCVA is a Christian coalition of local citizens, family, and neighbors dedicated to promoting
and preserving traditional conservative community values through God-honoring activities and
events in Mansfield.
We aren’t formally affiliated with any church, denomination, political party, or parachurch
ministry. Nevertheless, we consider ourselves to have a “broad tent” of agreement with various
Christian traditions. This tent has 4 basic pillars.
OUR CORE BELIEFS
1. The Christian faith as generally expressed in the historic Nicene and Athanasian Creeds
2. The Divine inspiration, inerrancy, sufficiency, and authority of Holy Scripture
3. The belief that there is only one way to God, and that is through faith in Christ alone.
4. The conviction that healthy communities are built upon strong families, personal
responsibility, moral virtue, and local civic engagement.
OUR APPROACH TO PUBLIC CIVIC LIFE
- We believe communities do not remain neutral. Every community is shaped by the
values it celebrates, rewards, tolerates, and transmits to future generations.
- For that reason, we encourage active participation in civic life through service, leadership, education, public advocacy, persuasion and lawful political
action. We seek to positively influence our community through both personal example
and public engagement.
MISSION – what we do
- To strengthen our community by promoting God-honoring values, supporting families,
encouraging community engagement, and preserving the moral and cultural foundations
that enable future generations to flourish.
VISION – what success looks like
- We envision a community marked by strong families with shared values, vibrant
churches, responsible citizenship, public virtue, respect for lawful authority, and a shared
commitment to the common good.
Article 1 - Communities and Neutrality
Why Communities Cannot Be Neutral
One of the most common ideas in our nation is that communities should be "neutral." We hear often that everyone should be free to do their own thing, and the government shouldn't take sides.
We can admit that at first, this sounds reasonable, but the more you think about it, the harder it becomes to find a single example of a truly neutral community.
Every community has values, every community teaches those values, and every community passes those values on to its children. The question is not whether this will happen, it’s simply “what are we passing on?”
Consider the kinds of things healthy towns celebrate. They honor veterans, thank first responders, acknowledge academic achievement, praise generosity, and encourage discipline and hard work.
Why? Because communities naturally honor the things they want more of.
Similarly, every healthy community naturally discourages that which harms them or their values. Healthy communities don't celebrate theft, reward fraud, encourage drunk driving, or praise negligence.
This isn't controversial, it’s common sense, and in fact, every institution operates this way. A football team excludes people who don’t play by the rules, a business will fire problematic employees, and even churches have boundaries that define whether or not someone is a member. None of these boundaries or exclusions are done out of hatred, they’re simply the result of having a defined purpose. A thing can only remain what it is so long as it has limits and bounds. This is necessarily true, and it means that every community must decide what it wants to encourage, what it wants to discourage, what it wants to celebrate, and what it wants to pass on to the next generation.
We know that some may respond by saying “that’s fine for churches or private organizations, but public life should be neutral.” We would simply respond by saying “that kind of neutrality is impossible.” Imagine a town deciding it will have no standards at all; zero shared values, no vision of what is good, no distinction between virtue and vice…what would happen?
The answer is again a simple one – someone else’s values will necessarily fill that vacuum. Any community that refuses to set standards for itself will inevitably allow the loudest voices, the most powerful institutions, the strongest activists, or the most influential “viral trends” to set the standard instead. In fact, even deciding not to take a position is nevertheless still taking a position. It’s inescapable that nothing like this can remain neutral.
We see that Scripture teaches this same principle – from its opening pages, God creates by making distinctions: light and dark, land and sea, male and female. And throughout the Bible, God’s people are always called to distinguish wisdom from folly, truth from error, and righteousness from wickedness. Jesus himself spoke of a broad road that leads to destruction, and a narrow one that leads to life. The Bible’s vision isn’t one of neutrality but of discernment.
So we see that the question facing any town is not whether it will have any particular set of values, or whether it will teach those values. The truth is it already does, and it already is.
The real question is: will we shape those values intentionally or not? Will we take ownership of our community and put forward those things we do want to prize and pass on, or will we, by apathy, let something else do it for us?
Article 2
Watch for it!