Purpose:
To make Jesus known and to grow together in Him.
Christ Church, Barnston and St Michael’s Pensby exist for two reasons. The first is to make Jesus known. We want to give every person who lives in our neighbourhood the opportunity to hear and respond to the good news about Jesus Christ. The second reason we exist is to help those of us who have responded to the good news of Jesus to keep going in our Christian faith. It can be very hard to be a Christian at times and so we exist to be a community that is mutually supportive and to help one another grow in our knowledge and love of Jesus.
Values:
We have five values as a church and it is our ambition that we would be marked by these values and they would flow out of all that we do.
1) Defined by grace
Jesus is gift. We did not earn Him and we can do nothing to deserve Him. We all do things wrong in our life but if we repent God will forgive us by his grace through Jesus. This means we are a church full of imperfect and messy people who frequently make mistakes. As we make mistakes we seek to gently restore people by pointing them to the good news about Jesus. Our church is not a sanctuary for the righteous but a hospital for the hurting.
2) Directed by the Bible
We know God through what He reveals about Himself in the Bible. As a church we seek to live our lives according to what God wants. We don’t know everything there is to know but everything we need to know to live a life that pleases God He has told us in the Bible. We are not simply influenced by the Bible but directed by it. We seek to change how we think and how we behave so that it more consistently reflects what the Bible teaches and therefore what God wants.
3) Dependent in prayer
As the creator of the universe, God is sovereign over everything that he has made, which means we depend upon Him for everything in our lives. We have access to speak to our heavenly Father through the death of Jesus upon the cross and now in power of the Holy Spirit we can pray to Him. As a church we express our dependence upon God through the privilege of talking to Him and asking Him to meet our needs. We pray corporately every day during the week and we have a larger prayer meeting every Thursday from 7-7:30pm at St Michael’s.
4) With compassion for our neighbours
Given that we have received undeserved kindness and compassion from God it is only natural that we would want to treat others in the same way that we have been treated ourselves. God has been generous to us and we want to be generous to others. Our society has many needs but they are often hidden from view. We want to support our neighbours in areas where they most need it, although we often don’t know where this is.
5) Confident and Joyful in our faith
Our faith is the declaration of the best news in the world; that Jesus is the King. This simple statement has profound implications. Jesus is a good king, He is the ruler and leader that we long for. Jesus is the king who cares for us and puts our interests before his own to the extent that he was willing to sacrifice himself upon a cross in order to pay the debt that we owed to God and rescue us from the claims of hell. Given that we have experienced such a great salvation at the hands of a servant-king, our natural response is to rejoice in the good news and to share it with others.