Embracing Our Purpose

The noted English architect Sir Christopher Wren was supervising the construction of a magnificent cathedral in London. A journalist thought it would be interesting to interview some of the workers, so he chose three and asked them this question, “What are you doing?” The first replied, “I’m cutting stone for ten shillings a day.” The next answered, “I’m putting in ten hours a day on this job.” But the third said, “I’m helping Sir Christopher Wren construct one of London’s greatest cathedrals.”

When we see how what we do contributes to the larger picture, it both encourages us and empowers us. We recognize that while we may have a unique role, we are not alone - we are on a mission with others.

That’s the power of vision and the church has the most compelling vision there is, in my opinion.

The vision of every church on the planet, no matter how they articulate it, is to fulfill two primary bible passages - the great commandment and the great commission which Brandon just read for us.

When you participate in our church services, when you share your faith with love and respect, when you volunteer to paint the foyer, or play for the worship team, or help teach our kids in Kidzone, you are part of the worldwide movement to love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, to love your neighbour as yourself and to make disciples of all nations.

And I want to say thank you. What you do matters and has eternal ramifications for individuals, for our community and our world. Well done, church.

As a church, we have the responsibility of contextualizing how we, as an organization, are going to live out the great commission and great commandment.

This has led us to adopting a vision statement. A vision statement is a short, memorable proclamation of what we would like to see if we did all that we say we are going to do, as followers of Jesus.

It’s a picture of the end result. It shows us where we want to be. And when we know where we want to end up, we can figure out how to get there.

Moving here, using GPS

For almost 15 years, the vision statement for Brentwood Park has been, “To be “a church without walls” making a significant difference for God by serving Christ in our community and the world beyond.”

It’s a vision statement that served this church well. It was the impetus behind the Connections Cafe and other ministries and I am grateful for Pastor Don casting that vision. But 15 years is a long time ago and a church’s vision, mission and values should be re-evaluated and updated every 5-10 years, in order to make sure that the church in on track to where God is leading it. I’ve already got it in my calendar to relook at our statements in January of 2029.

Now that Brentwood is in a new ministry season, the elders and I knew it was time to relook at our vision statement. We were grateful for the history of this church, even while we have an eye to the future.

Our goals with our vision, mission and values statements was that they would be:

Resilient (can handle changing culture)

Inclusive (that everyone from kids ministry, to facilities and elders could be a part of it)

Others Oriented (that the primary beneficiary of our vision wouldn’t be us, but would be others).

With all that, the new vision statement for Brentwood Park is “Our vision is to see all people fully alive in Jesus and sharing his love with others.”

We are excited about this because, while “fully alive” might mean different things to different people, for us it invokes a positive feeling of a person thriving in all areas of their life.

While we are excited for our new vision statement, which took a surprising amount of work to get to, a vision can only get you so far. Now that we see the goal - all people fully alive in Jesus and sharing his love with others - we need a plan to get there.

If our vision is the what, our mission statement is the how. It’s what we will use to determine what we say yes to, as a church, and what we say no to. It gives us a means of evaluating and strengthening every one of our ministries.

Our previous mission statement was “To connect people with God and each other through a life-changing relationship with Jesus Christ.”

It was a good statement, that again, benefited the church 15 years ago when Pastor Don cast it. As elders, we loved the idea of connecting people with God and others and how Jesus-centric the whole thing is.

So we took that statement and played with it a bit. We took some pieces out and built in it some more specifics to give us more direction. So our new mission statement is:

“Our mission is to empower people to grow in a relationship with Jesus through biblical teaching, passionate worship, community service and intentional relationships.”

This statement honours our past, draws from our previous core values and mission statement and yet helps us move forward in a clear way.

As elders, we want to encourage every one of our ministries to embrace and incorporate these four components: biblical teaching, passionate worship, community service and intentional relationship.

Not every ministry will always do all 4. Some may only do one, or two, but something of these core foundational pieces will be in every ministry of our church so that we can see all people fully alive in Jesus and sharing his love with others.

The last section we re-vamped was our core values. Core values are the culture we want everyone to both experience and to exude as part of our church.

Our previous core values were:

Authentic Community, Biblical Truth, Radical Transformation, Passionate Worship, Sacrificial Service, Christ-centered Mission

You can see how we have incorporated much of them into our mission statement because these were great values.

Moving forward, we chose 4 values that tie into our four core principles in our mission statement that we hope will be what people experience when they are with us.

Connecting to God through prayer and worship

Loving our neighbour

Experiencing life-transformation

Extending God’s grace to others.

I am really excited about these. In January, I’m going to do a teaching series on all of this, so we can go much deeper that we can today, but I am so proud of our Elders for how they collaborated and prayed, and worked to envision a new future for our church.

I think Brentwood Park’s best days are still ahead of it, not behind and I can’t wait to see what God does here.

Transition to Alpha.