Vision

Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?…Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” “So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.” (Matthew 22:35-40, NIV; John 13:34-35, NLT)

We believe that our calling as a church is to love God with all of our being and to love others as we love ourselves. We are convinced that this is a calling for us as individuals but just as much a calling for us as a community of believers. Our love for God is proven in our love for each other (1 John 4:20-21); our love for each other is the most profound witness of who God is and of what it means to be a Christian (John 13:35). It’s our love for each other that causes the rest of the world to say, “Hey, those people love God. Those people are followers of Jesus.”

We want to learn about God. We want to understand concepts of what we believe. We want to be active in serving each other. But our faith is proven and revealed by our love, and particularly by the way we treat people who are most difficult to love, who are most vulnerable in society, who are often ignored by our culture, who are unaware of who God is and all that God has done for all people in Christ Jesus. We have not come near reaching this goal, but our vision and our mission is to continually move us toward this life together.

The vision statement we have developed is our attempt at organizing and stating what we believe to be God’s plan for us as a community of people who are on a journey together in Christ.