| Vision Statement |
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Throughout the week our church will be filled with groups of people who are learning how to walk with God and be empowered by His Spirit. We see groups of people learning to manage finances, parent their kids, and get help with school work. We see people learning how to function as a family, being taught good nutrition, and receiving support and guidance to be free from addictions. We see a place where people are taught ethnic understanding and reconciliation. Above all, we want a church where people encounter Christ in worship, demonstrated lifestyles, and through our ministries. We can see a people so saturated in prayer and God's presence that people coming to Christ and giving Him their lives are natural consequences of being with us. We envision people who can articulate what a relationship with Jesus Christ really means. This desire to fulfill the great commission will extend beyond our local congregation. We see us continuing to send people from this church with the message of God's grace to lost people all over the globe.
With God's help, we can be a place that links human need with Christian resources. We hope to partner with already existing resources like Messiah College, HELP Ministries, and Christian Churches United in order to create ministries or work with already existing ones. We can see ourselves sitting with hungry individuals or families without heat in their homes in the winter and linking them with community ministries that specialize in these areas, or possibly meeting with these agencies to greate innovative solutions for hurting families. We can envision a congregation that helps urban and suburban churches partner with each other in ways that enable each group to share their rich resources with each other. We hope, as God leads us, to be a training center where black and white and Hispanic congregations come together and learn what God is teaching us as we are reaching out. In the end, we can see a church of healed and healing people, set free from Satan's entrapments. We can see a people who are restored to oneness with God, wholeness of self, and who have had broken relationships mended with others. We can see a people who can model, both in service and constituency, what the Kingdom of God looks like as a radical alternative to the broken and alienated world around us. We can see, with God's grace and power at work in us, a church that models heaven in some small way, where people "from every tribe and tongue and people and nation" praise God together. |