Our congregation wants to be more caring, more serving, more nurturing, more compassionate. If you take just one idea from my words here, it shouldn't be about methodologies that help you grow your church faster, or programs that you could establish in your cultural context, but it should be that a commitment to love more profoundly and more deeply will make you far more effective in bringing people to Christ. Our third goal is to be a voice of hope. The message of Jesus is a voice of hope, but frankly I think at times the church loses its focus on the Cross because we talk about so many different things. From this extraordinary context, we have distilled five core values that reflect our commitment to be a voice of hope.
Mission is why the church exists The first value is that mission is why the church exists.
Jesus came into the world declaring that He had come to seek and to save that which is lost, and He established a Church to take His gospel to the very ends of the earth. As we do this, we join God in His purpose in the world. It seems obvious to say that mission is why the Church exists, but there is often a great loss of focus along the way. The Church is not a social organization, a political organization, or a health club. We're to preach Jesus to those who need Him.