Our Vision: Community Connect
St Marks and St Davids is a community of people whom God has restored to himself. More about this here. As a result of God's action, we want to share this with our community.
Recently, all congregations of our church met together, for church, lunch, discussion and fellowship. Through this day, a new vision for our church began to emerge which we call Community Connect. Some of these discussions can be heard here:
1. Introduction and Bible Talk
2. Explanation and Commitment.
Community Connect is not just another program. It is a response to God's love that seeks to love our community and so introduce them to Jesus Christ. This commitment overarches two campaigns that will run in 2009—Connect09 and Jesus: all about life. Both of these campaigns have an expiry date whereas Community Connect is a core value. We want it to always be part of the culture and flavour of our church.
Community Connect means that we are driven by the love of God. Our love for God drives us to love those whom he loves—our church and our community. We do this in obedience to Jesus' command in John 13:34-35. We want to love one another in such a way that all people will know we are his disciples.
Being driven by the love of God means that we will prioritise and organise ourselves accordingly. There will be changes, big and small, as we pursue this commitment. We will:
- Pray for lost people in our community
- Probe and research to understand and better care for people
- Participate in the life of our community and build friendships
- Promote Jesus in our everyday lives
- Partner with one another in this endeavour.
We have begun to pray this simple prayer for individuals in our community. "Father I pray that I would practically love ________ as you love them. May __________ hear the gospel, turn to Jesus and so be saved. Please increase my friendship with __________ so I may be useful for your purpose. Amen."
One of the great encouragements of our time together was the realisation that we are already very well connected with many people and organizations in our community. Now is the time to deepen these relationships with the intention of introducing Jesus. We connect with the love of God in order to introduce the God of love.
At an immediate and practical level, many of us have now committed to prayerfully seeking to connect with at least one particular group, organisation or need within our community. Over lunch we formed ourselves into focus groups, prayed and began to consider how we might introduce Jesus into our relationships in these areas. This is just a first step-- but it is the first step in a very significant journey. Download our "Prayer Helper" here.
We invite you to join us in this great gospel commitment.
As a practical first step, we invite you to join us for prayer on Wednesday mornings at 9am at St Marks Church.
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