Monday, January 14, 2008

Love. Connect. Grow. Serve.

If you come to Hope Fellowship you will be very familiar with the words Love, Connect, Grow and Serve. But I realize that many of you who read this blog don't attend church here in Frisco, and might be interested in some of the things that we're doing here.

Over the last five months, I've had the opportunity to be a part of our staff as we re-defined our mission as an organization. In the fall, we had a staff retreat where we asked the question, What would a fully engaged attender at Hope Fellowship look like. We wanted to rewrite our mission statement so that it would be more explainable and attainable. We wanted those who call Hope their home church to be able to share with others more easily what our church was about. Not only that, but we wanted our mission to include not just WHAT we want to accomplish, but HOW we were going to go about doing it. So, each of the words (Love, Connect, Grow, Serve) also corresponds to the ministries that are in place to allow these things to happen.

I'll give you a snapshot here, and then I plan to expand on these a little more in future posts.

Love God.
Our weekend services are designed for people to experience God's love and allow us to express our love for God together.

Connect with Others.
People can connect with our church in membership, come to a Connecting Point event (more on that later) to join a life group, or other events that we will have throughout the year that give people opportunities to meet others.

Grow in faith.
Life groups are small groups of people (8-12) that provide an environment where people can develop authentic relationships with each other while growing in their relationship with God. (We have refined our strategy for life groups. I will be giving more detail on this later.) We will also expand our "Grow" area to include Discovery (a four week class for new believers), as well as support and recovery groups.

Serve the World.
People can serve by being involved in a ministry team at church, serving the community through a local outreach, or going on a short term missions trip. The church also makes sure that 10% of the money donated to the church is given back out to support missions.

Even though it sounds simple, it took us a lot of conversation and prayer before we felt good about making it our new mission statement. Now, every ministry is being organized with these four words in mind. Our children's and youth ministries are using the same language so we can create continuity throughout the church. It also helps us to be focused on what God has called us to do, and is helping us not to be sidetracked by things that may be good, but will take energy away from our primary mission.

I have really enjoyed the process that we have gone through in developing this. I was also excited by how willing our staff was to take this on, and how they are committed to seeing it come to fruition.

1 comment:

Jaime Kent said...

Cool, Mark. Sounds like you are really enjoying what you are doing!