Our Mission
Hi thanks for taking the time to check this out.
We have a great sounding mission statement and a pretty catchy micro version and an award winning logo which is very easy to include on all kinds of brochures and signs… but honestly… so what!!!
At the end of the day every church wants to say a few good things about it self and sell an image to the world of what it would like to be. We are all on about the love of God, growing and equipping disciples and reaching the world for the Lord aren’t we?
What really matters is the DNA, the ethos, the actual on the ground, face to face, day by day manifestation of the ‘reality’ of faith. I don’t want to tell you what we would like to be, but who we are and what our character is like in the highs and lows, the ups and downs and all the circumstances in life. Jesus didn’t just tell people his mission statement.. his words we’re more of the ‘follow me - come and see’ variety.
We’ve been here since early last century and have served the region consistently over that time. While there are heaps of new people here we also have a wonderful, dynamic and faithful cohort of folks who’ve been here for 40 years or more.
We worship multigenerationally, we are the young and the old, the bookends of life and the in-betweens. We experiment, we take risks, we honour people, we manage to have built a community of unity through diversity and we are not sold on perfection or performance. We simply bring our best and appreciate what God does with our gifts and abilities however well developed they may be.
We take our faith as a reality and fully expect God to surprise us with what He is doing in people’s lives. We are rich and we are poor, we are Anglo and we are increasingly from everywhere else. We have made a place for those who live in cars or behind public buildings or in three story houses and we place importance on a practical edge to spirituality.
Our focus of ministry is not just on the inside - but for the wider community. We have an open door to the wider world and people walk in daily. We spend time in schools, with other agencies and enjoy building relationships with other groups who are focused on justice, health, equity and dignity. We are global in our outlook and have developed long term relationships with communities in the Philippines, Vanuatu, Fiji and Zimbabwe to name just a few.
In short what can I say… We love the Word of God as revealed in Christ Jesus. While we are very ordinary people we serve an extraordinary God who sees more in us than ever meets the eye. We are not called to be Pharisees or legalists or literalists or self absorbed lay–abouts but generous, hope-filled, ever questing seekers of the Way of Christ. We are a living water church (John Chapter 4) engaged in the market place in all the areas that people meet and devoted to giving God room to speak life into the lonely, the broken, the shame filled and the lost - yep people just like me.
John Sharpe - Ministry Team Leader (August 2008)