Our Vision
We believe that, under God, our Mission (what God has given us to do) is to cultivate growth; which means transformed lives and the making of disciples. We believe this will happen in the context of belonging to our church community and being connected to our wider community.
This belonging stimulates real growth as we wholeheartedly love God and love others.
We have distilled our Mission into the following diagram:
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The diagram presents a network of ideas, summarised by statement ‘Growing Life Together with Christ’. Included in this Mission is the idea that we ‘Grow with Christ’, in the context of ‘Life Together’; we ‘Grow Together with Christ’, we ‘‘Grow Life Together’, along with all the other permutations of these four ideas. We believe that this Mission will be achieved through paying attention to: (i) God’s word, (ii) Prayer, (iii) Authentic Relationships, and (iv) Discipleship, which is the intersection of the preceding three. |
Our Mission statement does not intend to say everything about our church, but it does clarify the direction we believe God would have us go. It is the distillation of our leaders and elders’ reflection on the scriptures and prayerful discernment throughout 2010. Of all the possible things that we might prioritise, this is the one thing we believe God wants for us.
Of course, God’s work in our lives does not happen in a vacuum. We long that God’s Kingdom work would multiply through our networks of neighbours, friends and family. God’s love compels the whole body of Christ to ‘Promote the Gospel’, each one of us doing whatever we are gifted and enabled to do that others might respond to the gospel and grow up into Christ. This too is part of discipleship. Our first context is going to be the local Barrenjoey Area, but in partnership with others, we pray that our Mission might extend around the globe.
Focus on the ‘main thing’.
When we focus and organize our best efforts around ‘growing’ our engagement together with God in his word and prayer, and discipling one-another in the context of authentic relationships, the relative importance of our various activities changes. Quite simply, we want to do more intentionally ‘growing’ activities, and lower the priority of those activities that do not seem to contribute as much to our discipleship of Jesus.
With this in mind, under God we believe the follow areas become the focus of our attention:
- Home Groups
- One-to-one intentional discipling
- Prayer
- Church Gatherings
- Promoting the Gospel
- Youth and Children’s Ministry
St Marks and St Davids Ministry Plan 2011 - 2013
