Our Mission
Faith Church exists to love and lead people into a growing faith in Jesus.
In Matthew 28:19, Jesus left his disciples with one mission: to make disciples. A disciple is a follower of Christ - someone who is constantly growing in their faith and confidence in Jesus. For that reason, our mission is to love and lead people into a growing faith. We take Jesus at His word when He said that all authority was given to him, and we put our faith in His promise that he will always be with us. Our desire is to see a gathering of people bringing the good news of hope into the broken world we live in. God loves everyone wherever they are at, but loves them too much to leave them there.
Our Vision
Turning the church inside out to draw the outside in.
There are a lot of negative connotations surrounding the word “church” today. We believe that the church should be a community of people that are attractive and inviting, known more for what they’re for than what they’re against. We are a people that strive to be full of both grace and truth. We are far from perfect and that’s why anyone is welcome. We make mistakes and we aren’t immune to offending one another, but we aim to be known for our ability to forgive and love each other because God first loved us. We are a gathering of people determined to make a difference in our communities by turning the church inside out to draw the outside in.
CORE VALUES
The values that drive Faith Church are a commitment to remembering God’s act of reaching down to us in the gospel and responding by reaching up, in, and out.
DOWN | GOSPEL
The gospel is the “good news” that God has reached down to us in his Son, Jesus, to conquer sin, death, and their effects in our world. Through his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus has done what we never could. This gospel is the “power of God” (Rom. 1:16) to overcome the penalty of sin (past), the power of sin (present), and the presence of sin (future). It is the power for personal salvation and transformation, as well as the renewal of neighborhoods and nations. We never move past Jesus. We never graduate beyond the gospel. Who we are and what we do will be rooted in and empowered by God’s reaching down in the gospel.
UP | SPIRITUAL FORMATION
The gospel drives us to reach up to God. We have all been formed into a certain kind of person. In a world that encourages us to “be who you are”, the gospel drives us to be “conformed to the image of Christ” (Rom. 8:29). As the world pursues happiness, we pursue holiness (1 Thess. 4:7). Through spiritual practices like prayer, Scripture-reading and others, we experience renewed minds that enable us to live out God’s will (Romans 12:2). This involves personal repentance and faith in Jesus for a transformed life.
IN | COMMUNITY
The gospel drives us to reach into the community. The church is not a place but a people. It is to be our primary identity in this world, more than a political party or social class. God’s vision for the body of Christ is a multiethnic and intergenerational group of people united in Christ (John 17:21). When we hurt one another, we hurt our witness to the world (John 13:35) and grieve the Spirit of God (Eph. 4:30). Therefore, we must learn how to “speak the truth in love” to one another (Eph. 4:15) and to engage in healthy conflict (Matt. 5 & 18). In a world of individualism and isolation, the church is not a weekly gathering of individuals, but a community committed to loving each other well and doing life together (Acts 2:42-47). Community is the context for spiritual formation and mission; there can be no spiritual lone rangers.
OUT | MISSION
The gospel drives us to reach out to the world. The church is God’s missionary agency to fulfill the Great Commission (Matt. 28:16-20). “Missions” is not one committee within the church, but the very nature and purpose of the church. The same gospel that transforms and unites us also compels us outward on a mission. We exist as a church on a mission to be “a city on a hill” and “the light of the world” (Matt. 5:14). To that end, every small group and ministry team of our church should orient itself around a shared and defined mission to make disciples of a neighborhood or network of people in the Greater Worcester area and its surrounding communities.