What is CPR-3?

CPR-3 is a faith-based movement awakening, connecting, and unleashing God’s people to breath life and hope into the world.

The undeniable and visible essence that defines CPR-3 is that we are:

• A movement of God partnering with the church to breathe life and hope into the world
• A vehicle to connect and unleash the church to pursue her God-Given task
• Committed to do everything we do through the local church balancing sustainable concepts with the realization that we are blessed to bless others.

Our desire is to point people to Jesus and set the church up to win as it runs the race God has called it to, to love God and to love people. We hope to ignite in our partners a deeper ‘passion for God’ and ‘compassion for people.’

CPR-3 was birthed with the ‘cross’ in its DNA. CPR-3’s founder’s background in helping people was through his desire to care for people physically and spiritually as a worker with the Red Cross and a pastor in God’s Church. The ‘church’ is God’s chosen program to carry out the mission of Jesus by breathing life and hope into the very being and soul of every creature. That soul has incredible needs, physically and spiritually, we like to refer to this as ‘soul thirst.’

We must love people at the core of their being like Jesus did. He did not love us so that he could ‘win’ us to Himself. He loved us because He created us. He loved us so much that He gave us the choice to choose Him. He created imagery that we could understand. The first image is one of a ‘father figure.’  For those of His creation who choose Him, He will become their Father. We are immediately adopted and grafted into His family. The second image is of a ‘body.’ Jesus is the head of the Church and the Church is called the Body of Christ. We are the hands and the feet of Jesus. We are called to be like Christ.

He chose to hang on an old rugged cross and die a horrible death so that real life could be won for those of us who by faith through grace choose to trust in His Word, that He is the One and only Son of God and that by believing in Him they can have eternal or ‘spiritual’ life.  That is the spiritual realm of the cross.  This spiritual life was wrought with the stained blood of the perfect Lamb of God on a real physical wooden Roman cross.

God has called His body to take up their cross daily, to die to themselves, to serve others, to sacrifice and to be ready to pay the ultimate price of even laying down their lives for something far greater. If you have nothing worth dying for then you have nothing worth living for.

Although we know that real hope lies on the spiritual side of the cross, we are generally unable to see people experience the hope we long for them to have unless we care for their physical needs. CPR-3 is committed to the Church in carrying out the mission of Jesus, which is the Church. We want to see the love of Jesus planted in the fertile soil of His harvest field that we call the world.

Our goal is to set the church up to win, so long as it is pointing people to Jesus. We exist to coach and come alongside of the church to see Christ followers who are making disciples, who are making disciples. We want to see transformed lives. We want to breathe life into spiritually dead people.

CPR-3 has a growing list of ways to tangibly touch the physical needs of our world. People live in three levels of poverty. They are physically poor, spiritually poor and relationally poor. On the physical side, we are providing clean water to people who do not have access to this very basic need. We are on the front lines of eradicating malnutrition in Haiti.  Solving the issue of relational poverty is a part of our DNA. Presence matters. The essence of poverty is not the absence of things; it is isolation and alone-ness. We are helping the Church build relationships that matter. Spiritual poverty is accomplished as the Church obeys the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. We must love God and love our neighbor. We must make disciples who make disciples by “going, baptizing, and teaching and training” those whom we have the privilege of seeing trust Christ and then help them multiply that effort. Our goal is to get deeper and wider. We do that by our focus on the Cross!

CPR-3 and the Cross:

1. It all starts with the cross. We see the cross. Too many times we have seen the name of our ‘organization’ in the spot light. It is not about us.

2. Our name needs to be taken out of the spotlight and the name of JESUS needs to be front and center.

3. Jesus chose a cross that had physical and spiritual implications. He came to care for the real needs of a hurting world. He knew we had physical life and He came so that He could breathe spiritual life into a ‘valley of dead bones.’ Ezekiel ‘nailed it’ on the head! We must prophesy to the flesh and to the spirit. On the physical side, we must work hard as the Church and Body of Christ to manage the critical tension of serving the poor through sustainable solutions with the understanding that we have been blessed to bless others. As the Church we must make sure that we are pointing people to the cross and to Jesus and not our brand. The glory goes to Jesus!

4. Jesus has called out the Church to be like Him. He says, If you want to be my disciple, then you MUST die to yourself daily and take up your cross and follow me.

5. The Church is the plan that God has established to point mankind to real life and a Savior. The kingdom gains when the Church points people to Jesus.

6. In the end, it is all about JESUS. He gets the glory. That is the MOVEMENT that excites CPR-3. We get to come alongside of God’s movement called the Church. That is His mission. There is no government nor NGO (non-government organization) on the planet big enough or bad enough to tackle the global giants of the world. But there is one entity that is. It is the Church of Jesus Christ. It is His Body in which He is the Head.

Thanks for allowing CPR-3 to be a part of caring for physical and spiritual needs as we breathe life and hope into the world.