Mission & Values
Mission
To experience, celebrate and spread the life changing love of Jesus Christ through scripture, friendship and community.
Values
GOSPEL OF CHRIST & KINGDOM
The good news is that in Jesus Christ God’s purpose of establishing His renewing, life transforming Kingdom has definitively begun. Christ and His kingdom can never be separated as He is the source and centre of it. We are called to complete devotion to Christ Jesus and His Kingdom agenda as the ultimate value of life.
A KINGDOM OF GRACE
The Kingdom of God is a Kingdom of Grace. Grace is undeserved mercy. We enter the Kingdom by grace when God forgives us, changes us, and welcomes us into His family. He further lives in us through the Holy Spirit and we daily live by grace as we are empowered by Him for lives of fruitfulness. Thus saturated in God’s grace to us, we are then called to be full of grace toward each other and the world that desperately needs our witness.
COUNTERCULTURAL COMMUNITY
The Kingdom of God is made most real in the community of the Kingdom. Jesus created a new community – a new family – delivered from the destructive ways of the world and liberated to live with true security, freedom, love, and joy. This new family – the church – is God’s way of embodying the gospel to each other and the world. We are called to live for the higher purpose of Christ and His Kingdom. We are called to be a new society of sacrificial Christ-like love, of freedom and joy, of acceptance of others. The way we live together before God and the world is a first-fruit of the new age of the Kingdom, and is used by God as a power that reaches and reclaims a world of fractured relationships and broken lives.
SENT
Jesus said, “As the Father sent me, so I send you.” The purpose of Jesus to establish the Kingdom of God has been handed to every one of His followers. We are a sent community. We have been given the mission to bring the message of the Gospel to a needy and hurting world, for its good and God’s glory. We therefore want every follower of Christ to grow in awareness, ownership and participation in God’s Kingdom purpose.
INCARNATIONAL, CONTEXTUAL, BIBLICAL
A sent church must, like Jesus, enter into, rub against and be involved in the world we are called to reach. We therefore make it a priority learn about and understand our neighbours: their beliefs, concerns, aspirations, problems and needs. And we will seek to sensitively speak into their lives. Our worship will be conducted with the watching world in mind. Our preaching and teaching will understand and engage the attitudes and assumptions not only of Christ-followers, but of our Hindu, Sikh and Muslim neighbours. In all of this, the eternal Word of God is our rule and guide. A sent church must be seeking to bring the eternal Word to this changing world.
SACRIFICE
The cross of Christ is at the heart and centre of the Gospel of the Kingdom. Through His death and resurrection Jesus forgives, cleanses, reconciles us to God and breaks the power of sin over humanity, thereby making a new life of freedom possible. The cross of Christ is absolutely essential to the Gospel promise of forgiveness, renewal and healing. But the cross awaits every follower of Christ as well. Our Lord has placed the mandate of a cruciform ministry on the church. Not to save ourselves, nor even to overcome our personal sin, but as a ministry of self-sacrifice that demonstrates to the world the love of God. Through our crosses we represent His cross, and along the way we discover that by dying to self comes life; not only our own true life, but to others as well.
PRAYER
The priority of the Kingdom of God in life should have a two-fold effect in terms of prayer. First, the vision of the Kingdom – “Thy Kingdom come” – should shape our prayers: we seek nothing less than that all the brokenness due to sin be replaced with healing and health. We are called to believe and pray and work for the end of sin and curse and evil, to be replaced with SHALOM in every corner of the earth. But then, secondly, this vision exposes any pretensions that such transformation can occur through our own power. Prayer is thus absolutely essential to the passionate pursuit of the Kingdom of God. Our feeble prayer is often because we have a small vision, only attempting what is humanly achievable. But God’s grand Kingdom purpose reveals our weakness and dependence, and will drive us to our knees.