“The Road Ahead!” Last month, we wrote about what “The Road Ahead,” was all about: the future of our church, and an outline of what we want to achieve and how to get there. So now it’s time to answer another question: how are we deciding what gets our attention in the future? Great question! There are a million things we could have decided to focus our energy on as we move forward, but a million things would burn anyone out very quickly. So instead of starting with what we wanted to do, we started by looking at WHO our church is.
Remember those “Crossroads” surveys we took last year about your involvement, various programs, and their effectiveness? From those, lots of conversations and recalling story after story about the life of our church, our vision team honed in on six values we kept hearing over and over again. We have called these our CORE VALUES, and they make up the backbone of who our church is at our core. It’s our DNA, it’s what makes us different from other churches in the area, it’s what we gravitate towards and what makes us tick. Let me introduce them to you.
God, Faith, Family, Fellowship, Service and Sharing. More than likely you’ve already encountered these six core values in many aspects of our church today. But what do they really mean and how do they fit into our church culture? Let’s break them down one step further.
GOD | We are sinners called by God, redeemed by Jesus Christ, and empowered by the Holy Spirit. |
FAITH | We gather in worship and prayer, guided by Scripture and the Holy Spirit, to understand God and the new life God has given us. |
FAMILY | We care for the whole family of faith across the generations. |
FELLOWSHIP | We value doing life and ministry together, not alone. |
SERVICE | We encourage and support individuals to reach out in God’s love to meet the needs of our community. |
SHARING | We reflect God’s grace by generously sharing our gifts at home and abroad. |
This is who we are. This is what matters immensely to us. This is where our strengths lie, and this is what we created to help guide our future ambitions. We put God at the center of what we do, we value worship guided by Scripture and the Holy Spirit, but more specifically, we value worshiping together, as a family, with all ages! We absolutely love spending time together, especially if there is food, and we encourage all of our congregation to get involved with the life of our community, even to the point of generously sharing what we have with those around the world. Knowing that this is who we are helps us decide what to focus on in the future. What projects point to these values, what can our church do really well, what needs to be improved in order to showcase these values even more and also what needs to be let go so that someone else can do it better? These values have been extremely important in pointing us down “The Road Ahead!”
Throughout Summer, we introduced these values at the beginning of each church service. At this point, beginning with our “Kick-Off” Sunday on September 8th, we will be launching into an in-depth sermon series based on these values, showing their importance to our church and how we plan on using them as we look toward our future. We hope you join us this Fall as we continue to reveal “The Road Ahead!”
Grace & Peace,
“The Road Ahead” Steering Team
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