Our vision is summed up in the following five priorities. This underpins the culture we are developing.
Jesus’ method for reaching the world was making disciples who make disciples. We believe as a congregation that we are all called to live as lifelong disciples and that Jesus commissioned us to go and make disciples. This means our lives and relationships need to be 3 dimensional.
We will be looking and developing how we create a discipleship pathway which makes, marks, matures, mobilises and multiplies disciples. We use an introductory course called Discipleship 101 to cover the first steps of faith. We believe that discipleship is a lifestyle therefore Making Disciples underpins each of our other priorities.
We know within the Bible that developing leaders was key to the early church. As we look to make disciples, we look to have leaders who have capacity to develop other leaders. We should always be looking to train others to overtake us equipping them with the skills that we have so that they can oversee and develop areas. The process of developing leaders requires a pipeline where we recruit, train, deploy and review those we are developing.
What do we mean by growing churches? We believe that the church is the people – it is not somewhere we go but who we are. Growing churches has many facets to it. It could include the following different areas:
Ultimately, we know that growing churches only happens as God gives the increase. We are blessed that we can and have seen healthy growth over recent months with many new people. This has included those completely new to faith. Who knows we may need to multiply locations or services in the near future!
When we think about reaching nations, we can think that this means solely focusing on International Missions. This is clearly a very important part of what we mean. However, the early church was called to reach Jerusalem (where they were), Samaria (a little further afield to a people who were different to them) and to the ends of the world (internationally). As we seek to reach nations following this example – we can reach different national groups within Clacton – British, African, South American etc.
These people will also be of different age demographics. We as disciples are all called to lives as sent ones to our locality – our places of work, schools and neighbourhoods as well as to the nations. Internationally, we currently support missionaries in Burkina Faso who are growing and planting churches.
We at Family of Nations Church love the fact that we are a diverse group of people in age and ethnicity. When we get to heaven, we know ‘that every tribe and nation will be present.’ We want to experience a bit of heaven on earth.
We believe that everything we do is built on the foundation of prayer. Therefore, we collectively want to develop a culture and lifestyle of prayer where everyone participates. We currently have the Powerhouse of Prayer on Tuesdays at 7.30pm in which we have had some powerful times. We want to develop further access points, so prayer is flowing throughout the week.
For all these priorities to be developed further it is going to require all of us to participate in making the vision successful. Each of us has gifts that we have been given that God wants to use as each of us does our part. 1 Corinthians 12 reminds us we are one body with many parts but that we all belong to each other and need to function for the body to be healthy.
