VISION DAY: 12/02/2017
Vision Day!
For those of you who were at Realife on the 12th of February, you will have heard the fresh vision statements of the church for 2017. This isn’t just a day of learning what our leading pastors want to happen inside the building during the year. Rather, it means uniting and aligning our spirits to focus on a common goal to embody the bride of Christ. Pastor E began the morning with a great proverbial: ‘A knife cuts because it is focused.’ In other words, Vision Day is the day on which we unite in our focus to progress our relationships with God and each other. We want to be sharp, cutting through to the heart of what God wants for His people. I’m going to be pulling out a lot of rich excerpts from that sermon in this blog, so get ready for many quotation marks.
‘The world is our mission,’ and this year we are focused on bringing about the power of Jesus outside of our four walls by spreading it in all directions: Up, Out, and In.
Mission Up involves ‘develop[ing] our relationship with God by following Jesus’ example and teaching.’ It is to do with our personal relationship between us and Him, and by strengthening it we streangthen our personal ability to bring our missions field with us.
Focusing on Mission In means to ‘develop our relationship with God’s family by deliberately doing life with God’s family… [which is] the church.’ Here at Realife we try to maintain an incredibly strong concentration on connecting with our church family. It’s even declared in our overall mission statement that we aim to ‘connect people to God and one another.’ The ‘one another is very, very important, and one of the many reasons I love my church is that I genuinely feel like a welcomed member of the family, and have a connected to all of my many siblings/aunties/uncles. That’s Mission In in action.
Mission Out - our main direction for 2017 specifically - means the development of ‘our relationship with lost people by reaching out with compassion to the lost.’ This is only one beautiful facet of missionary work. It isn’t travelling to all corners of the world and handing out poorly made tracts in hopes that they will be read... It means physically entering our local (and global) community with the objective of providing people with the compassion and the love they need, and drawing them to God not only by our words, but largely by our actions.
‘If a disciple is a follower of Jesus, then discipleship is simply helping people follow Jesus, fellowship with other believers and fish for people.’ At Realife (not just in 2017, but beyond), we aim to be ‘disciples who make disciples,’ and ‘faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.’
That’s the bare skeleton description of our vision for our church. These are the areas we are focusing our hearts on. We have pamphlets and recordings (you can download the audio of the message [here]) and visuals about the entire message in our building, so I strongly urge you to get your hands or your ears on something to give you a detailed overview of who we are, what we do, and why we do it.
God bless you!
Emma J. Ware
