Meeting People

Over the past several months, our Purpose Task Force (made up of our full-time ministry staff here at Grace) has had several meetings to revisit and reevaluate the purpose statement of our church. Our goal was not to change are purpose but rather to take the overall purpose and mission of our church and to be able to state it in one brief, specific and transferable phrase in easy to understand terminology.

We begin our task by doing a SWOT analysis as we took time to examine the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats that our church faces. From that we worked, reworked, than reworked some more our purpose statement over and over, taking time to analyze each and every word. It was quite the challenge and a great group building experience. We then shared our phrase with the Elder Board and with our church staff who all readily accepted the phrase and saw the value of it indicating our purpose and our mission. Here it is…Grace Church is all about:

“Meeting people where they are; Moving people to where God wants them to be!”

Grace Church exists to meet people where they are which has two implications. The first implication is spiritual. Every person is somewhere on their spiritual journey. Some are far from knowing Christ while others are very near committing to a personal relationship with Jesus. Some are new believers in Christ while others are growing deeper in their Christian faith. We desire to meet people wherever they are at on their spiritual journey.

The second implication is geographical. We desire to be proactive in taking our ministries off of our campus and into our community so that we can meet people where they are at both spiritually and geographically. We saw this as being extremely important. Most all (with very few exceptions) of all that we do here at Grace occurs inside the walls or property lines of our property. This is good, but let’s be honest. The vast majority of the people who live in and around our community will never come on to our property as their first contact with us. As a result, if all we do is reach those who come on to our property, we will reach very few people in comparison to the number of men, women, boys and girls that God has put all around us. We must make it our mission and our purpose as a church to penetrate our community. We must take the ministries of Grace Church off of our campus and out into our community. We must meet people where they are, not just spiritually, but also geographically.

Grace Church also exists through the power of the Word and the Spirit to be used by the Lord to help move people from where they are at spiritually to where He wants them to be. We desire to see people far from the Lord move a few steps closer to a personal relationship with Him. We desire to see people who are close to saving faith in Jesus make that commitment to trust Him as Savior. We desire to see new believers grounded in their faith in Christ, and to see grounded Christians moved into a deeper relationship of maturity in Christ and service for Him. This is what Grace church is all about!