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Vision and Values
VISION DECLARATION
St John’s is a mission-focussed 21st Century church for Bradford, seeking to live out the vision of church set out in Acts 2:42-47:
‘They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.’
We believe this means a calling to be a daily, local, hospitable, radical and expectant Christian community. We therefore declare that:
We will gather in three weekly congregations (Living Water, Synergy and Roots) and in the cells linked to each of them; and through these communities we will make church a DAILY lived experience
We believe the LOCAL church to be the hope of the world and that our core mission is to the parish of Great Horton in which all of us are called to be involved through prayer and action, as well our personal Christian witness in our families, any workplaces and other networks
Our church community will be a place of welcome, help and encouragement to all without exception and that we will each respond to the call to be HOSPITABLE both in our homes and our church premises
We will strive to be a RADICAL community who love God and love the poor (Isaiah 58:6-7) and we will share both our lives and our possessions with each other, believing that it takes a community to reach a community.
We will be EXPECTANT that our great God is a God of signs and wonders, the greatest of which is lives transformed through a personal relationship with Jesus, believing that God has brought us to a season of harvest as described in Isaiah 35; to this end we also commit to the famous adage of William Carey to ‘expect great things from God and attempt great things for God.’
