The North River Community Church Mission Statement
“To walk in the power of the Holy Spirit,
to bring hope to the hurting
through Jesus Christ
to the glory of God.”
For you to truly know who we are and what we are about, we invite you to better understand our mission statement. Our mission statement is based upon the mission statement of Jesus Christ who announced the beginning of this ministry in this way:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
Because he has anointed me
to preach Good News to the poor,
He has sent me to proclaim freedom For the Prisoners,
And Recovery of sight for the blind,
To release the oppressed,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Luke 4:18-19 (NIV)
Clearly, Jesus came to bring hope to the hurting. He literally and figuratively brought good news to the poor, freedom to the captives, sight to the blind and freedom to the oppressed. Because Jesus Christ is alive, we believe that he continues in that ministry today through his disciples.
Our mission statement is designed to spur faithful imagination as we seek in our own time and community to extend the ministry of Jesus. We do not want to operate only “according to our own lights.” Rather, we want to be lead and empowered the very Spirit of God, to see the opportunities before us and to act in ways that are in keeping with the will of the Spirit.
Our desire is to bring an optimistic hope that is rooted, not in our own capacity to go on mustering up a reason to live, but rooted in the very faithfulness of God. We believe that God showed his faithfulness when he raised Jesus from the dead. We believe that God will always be faithful to us and will raise us from the dead and the many deaths we die in a lifetime.
We seek to bring this hope to the hurting. We understand “hurting” in the broadest sense of the word. We want to bring hope to those who are suffering “dis-ease” as a result of living in this chaotic world; to those who are striving to find something larger than themselves and a deeper meaning to life; to those who are disappointed, discouraged and grieving; to those who are in need of any kind of assistance.
Our desire is to offer hope in ways that are specifically Christian. That is, we do not offer hope for the sake of hope. Rather, our efforts always point beyond ourselves to the one who called us out of darkness into God’s marvelous light. We want everything we do to serve the mission of Jesus to “draw all people to himself.”
Finally, we want all of our efforts to be ordered by worship. We believe that our lives- whether personal, relational, moral, or spiritual- can only be rightly aligned as we turn ourselves toward the one who is our Creator, Sustainer and Savior. We want our whole lives to be an offering to God, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.
We try to realize our commitment through missional worship, prayer, fellowship, discipleship, ministry and outreach. We are growing to understand what it means to get “out of the box”- that is, to get outside the four walls of the church and serve the local, regional, and global community.
Though committed to the teachings of the Bible and surrendered to the Lordship of Jesus, we are an open church that values friendship, hospitality and freedom.
We measure “success” not so much in terms of the number of people in chairs on Sunday morning but by the kind of impact we are having on our community and our world. We want to always ask ourselves: “If North River Community Church disappeared tomorrow would anyone in our community miss us?” We want the answer to that question to be: “Yes!”
We do not offer membership in the traditional sense. We are not so concerned with names on a church roll as we are people actively engaged with one another in the service of Jesus Christ.
We are “kingdom-minded” and for that reason celebrate and support the work of any church or ministry that is striving to be faithful to the Lordship of Jesus Christ regardless of denominational “branding.” We join with other ministries to add our part to creating a “Kingdom impact” in the community and the world.
On top of that, we like to have FUN! We not only love each other, we like each other!
And we want you to come and be a part of this wondrous friendship we have found in Jesus!