Our vision statement is our attempt to describe what the message Jesus proclaimed many years ago looks like when it’s lived out today. Our mission statement is how we seek to implement this vision. He preached the advent of the Kingdom of God and he invited everyone to enter into it. Jesus never challenged us to advance the Kingdom nor were his followers charged with expanding it. He invited us to enter it ourselves and proclaim it to others. For Jesus’ Jewish audience living in a Roman kingdom dominated world, entering and proclaiming the Kingdom carried inherent meaning, but for 21st century westerners this language is oblique and unhelpful. A better contextualization of entering the Kingdom in modern language is found in words like salvation, transformation, and healing. Entering into Jesus’ Kingdom means fully living for God and becoming the person he has called and gifted each of us to be. This happens through personal and communal transformation into the image of Christ. We believe this will happen as we:
· Connect to God personally
Continually drawn by God’s love, filled by God’s Spirit, shaped by God’s Word, and attentive to God’s presence, we worship the living God with our hearts, minds, souls, and strength above all else and in all else. This includes practicing praise, prayer, obedience, sacraments, Sabbath, study, service, singing, silence, confession, celebration, fasting, feasting, forgiving, thanksgiving, and seeking God’s presence, power, and purposes in every aspect of our lives.
· Connect to God’s people
Most of God’s promises are made not to individuals, but to the collective Christian community called the Church, and apply to all who belong to her. In our uniqueness that results from diverse ethnicities, experiences, preferences, and perspectives, we are reconciled in Christ’s one body by a love that compels us to confront, confess, comfort, counsel, and celebrate each other in God’s name so that we might all grow in Christlikeness and reflect Christ to a world that longs to see Him still alive among them. We cannot love God, follow Christ, or fully preach the Gospel if we do not love one another, including our enemies. The primary context for individual spiritual growth and Gospel proclamation is Christian community. Through shared laughter, tears, prayers, experiences, and mutual submission, our relationships will become environments in which mutual dignity is protected, truth is shared, and forgiveness is sought, extended and received, resulting in repentance and reconciliation as we enter into the battle for each other’s souls against the power of sin and death.
· Connect to God’s purposes
We continue God’s work of creation and redemption of all creation in our worship, our work, and our relationships as we engage the world as servants of Christ, empowered, energized, and equipped even to suffer for the Gospel so that God’s will “will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven,” and in order to hasten the day when “every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord to the Glory of God the Father.” As the body of Christ, we want God to do through our body the very kinds of things He did through Christ’s body as we imitate our Lord’s passion for the least, the lost, and the left out and the lonely. We have been created and called by God, and we want to use “whatever gifts we have received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms.” We pray for and invite those who are estranged from our Savior and His Church to experience His Spirit alive in our community. Seeing our love for them and one another that transcends our differences and sins, they will get to taste of our Lord’s own love, and long to enter into community, initially with us and ultimately with God Himself.