People are blessed by serving

Recently the staff leadership team gathered for a facilitated meeting. The agenda was to discuss how we, as a church, are traveling. From this broad agenda we were able to identify ministry strengths and wins, roles of staff, and highlighted and addressed challenges that confront us.Many strengths stood-out, such as St Philips having a strong sense of community, being a place of peace and grace, it is a place where people are challenged and encouraged to be mission focused and there is a deep love for God and his people.  I have often witnessed these truths first hand. It was great hearing other members preach through January about their love for Jesus, hearing stories of people who have done radical acts of kindness for others over Christmas and people who have shown great love and support for those who were and are facing great suffering and trials. Praise God for His goodness to us.There were also challenges that were highlighted. We need to address these and through the power of the Holy Spirit see them as opportunities! We were challenged to articulate a clear vision, highlighting clearer steps to help people achieve what they believe God is calling them to do and to be part of, help grow youth, young adult and young family ministries, and generally attempting to strengthen our worship, pastoral care and missional ministries (UP,IN & OUT).As you can see there is much prayer required by us St Philippians if we want to see God’s favour rest upon us. This does not mean we have to do good works so God will like us and then favour us, but instead fall into His grace and be empowered by His Spirit to make disciples of all nations.We believe that God has called us to be a church where “people are blessed by serving”. This vision is not new nor is it a new direction for us as a church. It has come about and been strengthened through prayer, the reading of scripture and a clear sense of God confirming to us that a servant attitude to ministry is what is needed to see people come to know Jesus and be part of his kingdom. We also believe and know that we need to invest heavily in young people within and out of the church.  It would be a tragedy, if we didn’t attempt to reach young people and families with the gospel of Jesus and only looked after our own backyard.This defiant attitude to God’s calling would result in a very small, bored or even worse a dead church within a very short time. So we believe it is clear that we need to bless people by serving across all demographics with a strong focus upon the younger generations. We are looking forward to rolling out clearer steps of how, under God, this can be achieved so that more people will experience God’s favour and be blessed by serving.James