"To Reach Out in Love and Acceptance so that all may become
Fully Devoted Followers of Jesus Christ"
Members of our Leadership Team at a recent retreat doing unity building activities.
As a group, our planning team really struggled with our mission statement for quite some time. We looked at purpose statements of other churches and couldn't seem to make them fit our church. We examined the statement of the Minnesota Annual Conference of United Methodist Churches to invite, nurture and send, but felt it did not adequately describe what we were trying to accomplish. After a group of leaders and I attended a Willow Creek Leadership Summit in Chicago, we learned they had a mission statement. Willow’s statement is: "To turn irreligious people into fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ." We wanted our mission to reflect our Core Value of Acceptance, so we broadened the phrase to include more than just irreligious persons, but "ALL" persons. We wanted our church to focus on the unchurched, as well as the believer. We also wanted to include the phrase, "To reach out." We wanted the church to remember that it is a church based on evangelism and mission. By putting our outreach emphasis in the mission statement, we hoped that leadership would continue active evangelism. We expect the church to continue to knock on doors, call and invite persons, and use the latest advances in technology to further the gospel. Years from now, we want the church to reach out just like we are doing now.
---Pastor Paul Marzahn
