What are our mission priorities?

What are our mission priorities?

Throughout 2016 we spent time, with God and with each other, in talking, praying and considering. This process of reflection has helped us to clarify 3 areas of our life together.
Who are we?
Who is our neighbour?
What is God calling us to?
No single instant answer jumped out at us but we have felt a steady and growing sense of purpose develop among us. We can see that God is calling us to an inclusive and welcoming approach to our community that values hospitality, conversation and good hearted engagement with each other and our community

Community Engagement

Our church naturally sits at the heart of Athelstone. Our physical location draws attention to this. We have significant connection with the many individuals and organisations that make up Athelstone and have a unique opportunity to shape its identity. Our church can bring together many of these identities in ways that other organisations can’t.

Develop a new program that will engage the congregation in building connections with our community.

Spirituality

Our church loves to meet God. We look forward to feeling God’s Spirit move amongst us in our worship through our singing, prayers meditation and service of the word. We especially love worship that engages people of all ages and stages of faith. We want to worship in ways that we can feel good to invite our friends and family to.

Establish a team that continues to foster vibrant and engaging worship focusing on discovering new music and worshiping styles and building leadership capacity to meet the same.

Younger families

Our church is keen to make opportunities to develop new relationship with younger families. We that that we could build on our existing “Play and Stay” and our “Children’s Wirra” programs, together with developing our existing connections with young families.

Give priority to developing new ways of connecting with young families through establishing a monthly gathering of worship and hospitality.

Wider church

We recognise that we are one of many Uniting Church congregations in our part of the city. We want to develop good working relationships with and find ways of working co-operatively in ministry with other Uniting Churches.

Working with presbytery, have timely, regular and useful conversations with other churches with a view to finding ways of developing new cooperative ministry and mission initiatives.

Reshaping our life together

We recognise that in setting these 4 goals existing expectations in our life together may need to change. Good things we currently do may need to take second place or be placed on hold for a time in order to give time and other resources to grow in new directions.